Protection and the Product Line: Monopoly and Product Quality / Kala Krishna.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Krishna, Kala.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w1537.

NBER working paper series no. w1537

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Protection and the Product Line

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 1985.

Summary:

Thereare three points made in this paper. The first is that the question concerning choice of a product line by a monopolist is similar in structure to other adverse selection problems -- and can be analyzed in an elementary way by adapting techniques recently developed for such problems. Such an analysis is developed in the first section. The second is that when a foreign monopolist produces a product line, protection will change the composition of the entire product line.The nature of such effects is studied in the second section and this analysis is greatly simplified by the results of the first sectton. In line with empirical work on the subject, quotas are shown to raise the average quality of imports, while the effects of tariffs are ambiguous.The third concerns the possibility of profit shifting protection which is welfare increasing. The welfare consequences of protection are analyzed in the third section, and are shown to depend crucially on the distribution of consumers.

Notes:

Print version record

1985.