IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/jrp/jrpwrp/2011-042.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Intrafirm Conflicts and Interfirm Price Competition

Author

Listed:
  • Werner Güth

    (Max Planck Institute of Economics, Strategic Interaction Group)

  • Kerstin Pull

    (University of Tübingen, Department of Economics and Business Administration)

  • Manfred Stadler

    (University of Tübingen, Department of Economics and Business Administration)

Abstract

We study interfirm price competition in the presence of horizontal and vertical intrafirm conflicts in each firm. Intrafirm conflicts are captured by a principal-agent framework with firms employing more than one agent and implementing a tournament incentive scheme. The principals offer premium incentives in the sense of revenue shares to which agents react by proposing a sales price. Introducing such intrafirm conflicts results in higher prices and lower effort levels. Increasing the number of agents lowers the optimal surplus share of the agents as well as the individual effort and the sales prices. Firm profits first increase and then decrease when employing more and more agents suggesting that principals should employ an intermediate number of agents.

Suggested Citation

  • Werner Güth & Kerstin Pull & Manfred Stadler, 2011. "Intrafirm Conflicts and Interfirm Price Competition," Jena Economics Research Papers 2011-042, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena.
    • Handle: RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2011-042
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://oweb.b67.uni-jena.de/Papers/jerp2011/wp_2011_042.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Matthias Kräkel, 2005. "Strategic delegation in oligopolistic tournaments," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 9(4), pages 377-396, December.
    2. Geoffrey Brennan & Werner Güth & Hartmut Kliemt, 2004. "Approximate Truth in Economic Modelling," Papers on Strategic Interaction 2004-38, Max Planck Institute of Economics, Strategic Interaction Group.
    3. Fershtman, Chaim & Judd, Kenneth L, 1987. "Equilibrium Incentives in Oligopoly," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 77(5), pages 927-940, December.
    4. Jensen, Michael C & Murphy, Kevin J, 1990. "Performance Pay and Top-Management Incentives," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 98(2), pages 225-264, April.
    5. Steven D. Sklivas, 1987. "The Strategic Choice of Managerial Incentives," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 18(3), pages 452-458, Autumn.
    6. Fershtman, Chaim, 1985. "Managerial incentives as a strategic variable in duopolistic environment," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 3(2), pages 245-253, June.
    7. David M. Kreps & Jose A. Scheinkman, 1983. "Quantity Precommitment and Bertrand Competition Yield Cournot Outcomes," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 14(2), pages 326-337, Autumn.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pull, Kerstin & Stadler, Manfred, 2015. "Contests vs. piece rates in product market competition," University of Tübingen Working Papers in Business and Economics 85, University of Tuebingen, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, School of Business and Economics.
    2. Max Albert & Andreas Hildenbrand, 2016. "Industrial Organization and Experimental Economics: How to Learn from Laboratory Experiments," Homo Oeconomicus: Journal of Behavioral and Institutional Economics, Springer, vol. 33(1), pages 135-156, August.
    3. Hildenbrand, Andreas & Duran, Mihael, 2013. "The role of managerial work in market performance: A monopoly model with team production," University of Tübingen Working Papers in Business and Economics 66, University of Tuebingen, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, School of Business and Economics.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Güth, Werner & Pull, Kerstin & Stadler, Manfred, 2012. "Strategic delegation in price competition," University of Tübingen Working Papers in Business and Economics 43, University of Tuebingen, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, School of Business and Economics.
    2. Iván Barreda-Tarrazona & Nikolaos Georgantzís & Constantine Manasakis & Evangelos Mitrokostas & Emmanuel Petrakis, 2012. "Managerial compensation contracts in quantity-setting duopoly," Working Papers 2012/17, Economics Department, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain).
    3. Evangelos Mitrokostas & Emmanuel Petrakis, 2014. "Organizational structure, strategic delegation and innovation in oligopolistic industries," Economics of Innovation and New Technology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 23(1), pages 1-24, January.
    4. Güth, Werner & Pull, Kerstin & Stadler, Manfred, 2014. "Delegation, worker compensation, and strategic competition," University of Tübingen Working Papers in Business and Economics 67, University of Tuebingen, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, School of Business and Economics.
    5. Nicola Meccheri & Luciano Fanti, 2012. "Managerial Delegation Schemes in a Duopoly with Endogenous Production Costs: A Comparison of Sales and Relative Profit Delegation under Centralised Unionisation," Working Paper series 44_12, Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis.
    6. Constantine Manasakis & Evangelos Mitrokostas & Emmanuel Petrakis, 2010. "Endogenous managerial incentive contracts in a differentiated duopoly, with and without commitment," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 31(8), pages 531-543, December.
    7. P. Herings & Kirsten Rohde, 2008. "On the completeness of complete markets," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 37(2), pages 171-201, November.
    8. Luciano Fanti & Nicola Meccheri, 2013. "Managerial Delegation under Alternative Unionization Structures," LABOUR, CEIS, vol. 27(1), pages 38-57, March.
    9. Fanti, Luciano & Gori, Luca & Sodini, Mauro, 2012. "Nonlinear dynamics in a Cournot duopoly with relative profit delegation," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 45(12), pages 1469-1478.
    10. Luciano Fanti, 2017. "An Observable Delay Game with Unionised Managerial Firms," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 64(1), pages 50-69, February.
    11. Cong Pan & DongJoon Lee & Kangsik Choi, 2020. "Firms’ strategic delegation with heterogeneous consumers," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 131(3), pages 199-221, December.
    12. Gonzalez-Maestre, Miguel & Lopez-Cunat, Javier, 2001. "Delegation and mergers in oligopoly," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 19(8), pages 1263-1279, September.
    13. Fanti, Luciano & Gori, Luca, 2011. "Stability analysis in a Cournot duopoly with managerial sales delegation and bounded rationality," MPRA Paper 33828, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    14. Bloomfield, Matthew J., 2021. "Compensation disclosures and strategic commitment: Evidence from revenue-based pay," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(2), pages 620-643.
    15. Neus, Werner & Stadler, Manfred, 2022. "The tragedy of the common holdings: Coordination strategies and product market competition," University of Tübingen Working Papers in Business and Economics 154, University of Tuebingen, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, School of Business and Economics.
    16. Werner Güth & Kerstin Pull & Manfred Stadler, 2009. "Intra-firm Conflicts and Interfirm Competition," Jena Economics Research Papers 2009-007, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena.
    17. Barreda-Tarrazona, Iván & Georgantzís, Nikolaos & Manasakis, Constantine & Mitrokostas, Evangelos & Petrakis, Emmanuel, 2016. "Endogenous managerial compensation contracts in experimental quantity-setting duopolies," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 205-217.
    18. Constantine Manasakis & Evangelos Mitrokostas & Emmanuel Petrakis, 2007. "Endogenous Strategic Managerial Incentive Contracts," Working Papers 0706, University of Crete, Department of Economics.
    19. Rajesh K. Aggarwal & Andrew A. Samwick, 1999. "Executive Compensation, Strategic Competition, and Relative Performance Evaluation: Theory and Evidence," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 54(6), pages 1999-2043, December.
    20. Claude d'Aspremont & Rodolphe Dos Santos Ferreira & Louis-André Gérard-Varet, 2007. "Competition For Market Share Or For Market Size: Oligopolistic Equilibria With Varying Competitive Toughness," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 48(3), pages 761-784, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Price competition; Agency theory;

    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • L22 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Organization and Market Structure
    • M52 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Personnel Economics - - - Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2011-042. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Markus Pasche (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.jenecon.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.