讲座时间：2024年9月24日（周二）上午10:00-11:30

讲座地点：节约楼109

讲座题目：Detecting Collusion in High-Dimensional Oligopoly Models: The Case of the U.S. Corn Seed Industry

主讲人：Guanming Shi (Renk Professor and Department Chair, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics)

报告摘要：

The nature of firm conduct significantly affects market outcomes. Existing research estimating conduct parameters of a large number of firms suffers from the curse of dimensionality. This paper develops a novel structural model of demand and supply that allows for the flexible estimation of the degree of collusion. The proposed framework is empirically tractable even for a large number of multiproduct firms. The model is applied to the U.S. corn seed industry using farm-level transaction data. Despite concerns about the ramifications of the growing market power of large biotech firms in the seed industry, little is known about how firms compete or collude in their pricing. The estimation results indicate a distinct difference in the conduct of the two largest firms: one operates under imperfect collusive conduct, while the other engages in Bertrand price competition. The remaining three firms also exhibit the conduct of imperfect collusion. The estimated markups are approximately 36%-53%, reflecting both product differentiation and the degree of collusion. Counterfactual simulations imply that the observed average corn seed price was 37% lower than it would be in a perfect collusive equilibrium but 6% higher than in a Bertrand price competition scenario.

主讲人简介：

本科毕业于复旦大学国际金融系，于Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Berkeley获得博士学位，同年加入University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics，历任助理教授，副教授，教授，现任系主任，并长期担任系研究生招生委员会及研究生项目委员会主任，以及学院学校各类学术委员会成员。

Guanming Shi is a professor, the Renk Agribusiness Chair, and the Department Chair of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She is a core faculty member of the Initiative for Studies in Transformational Entrepreneurship Cluster, UW Madison, School of Business, co-founder and co-director of Pan Asia Pacific Sustainability Initiative (PAPSI), and serves in multiple college and campus level academic administrative committees. She studies the economics of industrial organization in the U.S and China. Much of her research focuses on firms’ strategic behavior under imperfect competition including pricing, product offering, collusion, and intellectual property protection, with applications to biotechnology and innovation in the genetically modified seed industry. She is also interested in the adoption, profitability and impact of new technology, and emerging issues related to environment and development in developing economy.Her work has been published in top field economics journals such as American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Review of Industrial Organization, European Review of Agricultural Economics, Environment and Development Economics, as well as in high impact interdisciplinary journals such as Nature Biotechnology and Science of the Total Environment. She received her Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California at Berkeley.