Does competition increase pass-through?
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Authors
Ritz, Robert
Publication Date
2019-08-21Series
Cambridge Working Papers in Economics
Publisher
Faculty of Economics
Type
Working Paper
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Ritz, R. (2019). Does competition increase pass-through?. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.43921
Abstract
How does market power affect the rate of pass-through from marginal cost to the market price? A standard intuition is that more competition makes prices more “cost-reflective” and thus raises cost pass-through. This paper shows that this intuition is sensitive to the common assumption in the literature that firms’ marginal costs are constant. If firms have even modestly increasing marginal costs, more intense competition actually reduces pass through. These results apply to the “normal” case where pass-through is less than 100%. They have implications for competition policy and environmental regulation.
Keywords
Cost pass-through, imperfect competition, perfect competition, production technology
Identifiers
CWPE1974
This record's DOI: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.43921
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/296879
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