Covid-19 pandemics has fostered a pervasive use of facemasks all around the world. While they help in preventing infection, there are concerns related to the possible impact of facemasks on social ...communication. The present study investigates how emotion recognition, trust attribution and re-identification of faces differ when faces are seen without mask, with a standard medical facemask, and with a transparent facemask restoring visual access to the mouth region. Our results show that, in contrast to standard medical facemasks, transparent masks significantly spare the capability to recognize emotional expressions. Moreover, transparent masks spare the capability to infer trustworthiness from faces with respect to standard medical facemasks which, in turn, dampen the perceived untrustworthiness of faces. Remarkably, while transparent masks (unlike standard masks) do not impair emotion recognition and trust attribution, they seemingly do impair the subsequent re-identification of the same, unmasked, face (like standard masks). Taken together, this evidence supports a dissociation between mechanisms sustaining emotion and identity processing. This study represents a pivotal step in the much-needed analysis of face reading when the lower portion of the face is occluded by a facemask.
Collusion in quality‐segmented markets Bos, Iwan; Marini, Marco A.
Journal of public economic theory,
April 2022, Letnik:
24, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper analyzes price collusion in a repeated game with two submarkets: a standard and a premium quality segment. Within this setting, we study four types of price‐fixing agreement: (i) a ...segment‐wide cartel in the premium submarket only, (ii) a segment‐wide cartel in the standard submarket only, (iii) two segment‐wide cartels, and (iv) an industry‐wide cartel. We present a complete characterization of the collusive pricing equilibrium and examine the corresponding effect on market shares and welfare. Partial cartels operating in a sufficiently large segment lose market share and the industry‐wide cartel prefers to maintain market shares at precollusive levels. The impact on consumer and social welfare critically depends on the cost of producing quality. Moreover, given that there is a cartel, more collusion can be beneficial for society as a whole.
This paper examines a homogeneous-good Bertrand–Edgeworth oligopoly model to explore the role of firm size and number in pricing. We consider the price impact of merger, break up, investment, ...divestment, entry and exit. A merger leads to higher prices only when it increases the size of the largest seller and industry capacity is neither too big nor too small post-merger. Similarly, breaking up a firm only leads to lower prices when it concerns the biggest producer and aggregate capacity is within an intermediate range. Investment and entry (weakly) reduce prices, whereas divestment and exit yield (weakly) higher prices. Taken together, these findings suggest that size matters more than number in the determination of oligopoly prices.
•Influence of disclosure of managerial contracts on NGO fundraising competition.•Mandatory disclosure decreases fundraising competition and increases NGO outputs.•Yields inefficient project ...clustering for sufficiently different donor valuations.•Results hold in NGO oligopoly and under fundraising spillovers.
Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) have been recently mandated to disclose the details of their executives’ compensation packages. Contract information is now accessible not only to current and prospective donors, but also to rival NGOs competing for donations in the fundraising market. We analytically study the impact of publicly available contract information on fundraising competition of NGOs. Although such a provision makes contract information available to multiple stakeholders and increases the transparency of the NGO sector, we argue that it also induces NGOs to use properly designed managerial incentive contracts strategically to influence rival NGOs. In particular, we find that the observability of incentive contracts reduces existing fundraising competition. This can be beneficial in terms of NGOs’ outputs and social welfare, in particular when these organizations are trapped in a situation of excessive fundraising activities. However, we show that when donors’ willingness-to-give for projects are sufficiently different, publicly available contract information can distort the NGOs’ choice of projects, leading to socially inefficient project clustering.
This special issue features 14 new research papers investigating the role of farmers’ organizations (e.g., collective action, self‐help groups, producer companies/organizations, and cooperatives) in ...supporting sustainable development. The key findings include: (1) farmer groups and cooperatives promote farmers’ adoption of good farm management practices, new agricultural technologies and sustainable farming practices, although not substantially improving farm yield; (2) outsourcing services provided by agricultural cooperatives help to increase the technical efficiency of crop production; (3) cooperative membership enhances members’ bargaining power and enables them to sell their products at higher prices; (4) cooperatives motivate rural laborers to work in off‐farm sectors, while self‐help groups empower rural women in decision‐making; (5) internet use improves agricultural cooperatives’ economic, social, and innovative performances; (6) direct administrative intervention supporting cooperative development may lead to the emergence of shell cooperatives; (7) participation in forest farmer organizations enables wood value chain upgrading; (8) increasing the cooperative size in terms of income, equity, and assets increases the profitability of savings and credit cooperatives; and (9) creating cross‐border cooperation between cooperatives generates benefits for all parties involved. These findings can inspire the design of policies aimed to support farmers’ organizations in achieving sustainable development goals.
We study how the supply of environmentalism, which is defined by psychic benefits (costs) associated with the purchase of high-environmental (low-environmental) qualities, affects the way firms ...choose their prices and products and the ensuing consequences for the global level of pollution. Contrary to general belief, a high supply of environmentalism does not necessarily give rise to a better environmental outcome because it endows the green firms with more market power which they use to charge higher prices. Nonetheless, environmentalism can be used to effectively complement more traditional policy instruments such as a minimum environmental standard.
This paper explores how social interactions among consumers shape markets. In a two‐country model, consumers meet and exchange information about the quality of the goods. As information spreads, ...demand evolves, affecting the prices and quantities manufactured by profit‐maximizing firms. We show that market prices with informational frictions reach the duopoly price with full information at the limit. However, this convergence can take different paths depending on the size asymmetry between countries. In particular, when the country producing the low‐quality good is relatively large, the single market does not immediately turn into a duopoly and can be temporarily trapped in a situation of price instability where no Nash equilibrium in pure (but only in mixed) strategies exists and prices can fluctuate between their monopoly and duopoly levels. It follows that the classical price‐reducing effects of international trade may take longer to appear. In view of an intense globalization process, understanding how social meetings affect market outcomes is critical for understanding the performance of international economic integration.
This note considers cartel stability when the cartelized products are vertically differentiated. If market shares are maintained at pre-collusive levels, then the firm with the lowest competitive ...price-cost margin has the strongest incentive to deviate from the collusive agreement. The lowest-quality supplier has the tightest incentive constraint when the difference in unit production costs is sufficiently small.
•We consider cartel stability when firms sell vertically differentiated products.•Deviating incentives are decreasing in the competitive profit margin.•The lowest-quality firm has the strongest incentive to defect with similar unit costs.
Myopic oligopoly pricing Bos, Iwan; Marini, Marco A.; Saulle, Riccardo D.
Games and economic behavior,
05/2024, Letnik:
145
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper examines capacity-constrained oligopoly pricing with sellers who seek myopic improvements. We employ the Myopic Stable Set solution concept and establish the existence of a unique ...pure-strategy price solution for any given level of capacity. This solution is shown to coincide with the set of pure-strategy Nash equilibria when capacities are large or small. For an intermediate range of capacities, it predicts a price interval that includes the mixed-strategy support. This stability concept thus encompasses all Nash equilibria and offers a pure-strategy solution when there is none in Nash terms. It particularly provides a behavioral rationale for different pricing patterns, including Edgeworth price cycles and states of hyper-competition with supply shortages. We also analyze the impact of a change in firm size distribution. A merger among the biggest firms may lead to more price dispersion as it increases the maximum and decreases the minimum myopically stable price.
Within the field of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, facing impaired speech is a big challenge because standard approaches are ineffective in the presence of dysarthria. The first aim of ...our work is to confirm the effectiveness of a new speech analysis technique for speakers with dysarthria. This new approach exploits the fine-tuning of the size and shift parameters of the spectral analysis window used to compute the initial short-time Fourier transform, to improve the performance of a speaker-dependent ASR system. The second aim is to define if there exists a correlation among the speaker’s voice features and the optimal window and shift parameters that minimises the error of an ASR system, for that specific speaker. For our experiments, we used both impaired and unimpaired Italian speech. Specifically, we used 30 speakers with dysarthria from the IDEA database and 10 professional speakers from the CLIPS database. Both databases are freely available. The results confirm that, if a standard ASR system performs poorly with a speaker with dysarthria, it can be improved by using the new speech analysis. Otherwise, the new approach is ineffective in cases of unimpaired and low impaired speech. Furthermore, there exists a correlation between some speaker’s voice features and their optimal parameters.
PDF
