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Welfare Effects of Buyer and Seller Power
2025-02-28
Time: 10:00 am- 11:30 am, Feb. 28th, 2025
Speaker: Michael Rubens
(University of California Los Angeles)
Venue: 1F, Wanzhong Building, Langrun Garden, Peking University
Platform: Zoom
Meeting ID: 821 9499 0142
Passcode: 655507
Abstract:
We provide a theoretical characterization of the welfare effects of buyer and seller power in vertical relations and introduce an empirical approach for quantifying the contributions of each to the welfare losses from market power. Our model accommodates both monopsony distortions from buyer power and double-marginalization distortions from seller power. Rather than imposing one of these vertical distortions by assumption, we allow them to arise endogenously based on model primitives. We show that the relative elasticity of upstream supply and downstream demand is the key determinant of whether buyer or seller power creates a market power distortion. Applying our framework to coal procurement by power plants in Texas, we find that 83% of the distortion comes from the monopoly power of coal mines, with the remainder attributed to the monopsony power of power plants.
Speaker:
Michael Rubens is an Assistant Professor of Economics at UCLA, working in the field of industrial organization. His research agenda focuses on market power and vertical relations, with a special focus on monopsony/oligopsony power, and has been published in the RAND Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Political Economy. He obtained a PhD in Economics from KU Leuven (Belgium) in 2020.