Stochastic Market Sharing, Partial Communication and Collusion

This paper analyzes the role of communication between firms in an infinitely repeated Bertrand game in which firms receive an imperfect private signal of a common value i.i.d. demand shock. It is shown that firms can use stochastic, inter-temporal market sharing as a perfect substitute for communication in low demand states. Therefore, partial communication in high demand states is sufficient to achieve the most collusive, full communication outcome. And partial communication in low demand state does not improve on the equilibrium without communication. Communication in high demand states allows firms to coordinate their pricing, choose the most efficient uninformed price and avoid price wars. I demonstrate that under some conditions consumers are better off with communication among colluding firms.Stochastic Market Sharing, Communication, Collusion, Competition Policy

Monetary policy and TIPS yields before the crisis

We make three points. First, the decade before the financial crisis in 2007 was characterized by a collapse in the yield on TIPS. Second, estimated VARs for the federal funds rate and the TIPS yield show that while monetary policy shocks had negligible effects on the TIPS yield, shocks to the latter had one-to-one effects on the federal funds rate. Third, these findings can be rationalized in a New Keynesian model

Atomic decompositions of mixed norm Bergman spaces on tube type domains

We use the author's previous work on atomic decompositions of Besov spaces with spectrum on symmetric cones, to derive new atomic decompositions for Bergman spaces on tube type domains. It is related to work by Ricci and Taibleson who derived decompositions for classical Besov spaces from atomic decompositions of Bergman spaces on the upper half plane. Moreover, for this class of domains our method is an alternative to classical results by Coifman and Rochberg, and it works for a larger range of Bergman spaces.Comment: 9 page

Gender politics in Indonesia - recent developments: an interview with Yuniyanti Chuzaifah

Yuniyanti Chuzaifah is one of the founders of "Voice of Concerned Mothers" (Suara Ibu Peduli or SIP) and later joined the "Coalition of Indonesian Women" (Koalisi Perempuan Indonesia or KPI). She studied at the Universities of Leiden and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and later returned to Indonesia. Since March 2010 she has been the Director of the "Indonesian National Commission on Violence against Women" (Komnas Perempuan). This interview was conducted on 15 March 2010 at the organisation’s premises in Jakarta

Mean ergodicity vs weak almost periodicity

We provide explicit examples of positive and power-bounded operators on $c_0$ and $\ell^\infty$ which are mean ergodic but not weakly almost periodic. As a consequence we prove that a countably order complete Banach lattice on which every positive and power-bounded mean ergodic operator is weakly almost periodic is necessarily a KB-space. This answers several open questions from the literature. Finally, we prove that if $T$ is a positive mean ergodic operator with zero fixed space on an arbitrary Banach lattice, then so is every power of $T$.Comment: 10 pages; minor adjustments and three new references included compared to version

Deflation and relative prices : evidence from Japan and Hong Kong

We test the menu cost model of Ball and Mankiw (1994, 1995), which implies that the impact of price dispersion on inflation should differ between inflation and deflation episodes, using data for Japan and Hong Kong. We use a random cross-section sample split when calculating the moments of the distribution of price changes to mitigate the small-cross-sectionsample bias noted by Cecchetti and Bryan (1999). The parameter on the third moment is positive and significant in both countries during both the inflation and deflation periods, and the parameter on the second moment changes sign in the deflation period, as the theory predicts. Keywords: inflation, deflation, menu costs, Hong Kong, Japan JEL Numbers: E3