Does Restricting Outsiders Always Lower Price and Benefit Insiders?

Tat-kei Lai and Travis Ng ()
Additional contact information
Travis Ng: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Working Papers from IESEG School of Management

Abstract: Policies that restrict outsiders are common. Some justifications include protecting insiders from high price and leaving more of the concerned products to insiders. Sometimes these policies fail to work because outsiders can get around the restrictions. In a model in which a policy of restricting outsiders is anticipated, we find that if the policy works, it only sometimes lowers the price. When the price does decrease, the product quality decreases too. Not every insider would benefit equally; those insiders who likely suffer are identified. While restricting outsiders may or may not reduce insiders’ consumer surplus, outsiders and the producer are always worse off. They therefore would find ways to get around the restrictions. Evaluating these policies must (a) take into account the possibility that they might not work at all, (b) check their effects beyond just price if they do work.

Keywords: Product quality; Customer restrictions; Vertical restraints; Foreign restrictions; Discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K25 K29 L25 L51 R38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34
Date: 2024-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-mac and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ieseg.fr/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2024-IFlame-03.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Restricting Outsiders Always Lower Price and Benefit Insiders? (2022)
Working Paper: Does Restricting Outsiders Always Lower Price and Benefit Insiders? (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ies:wpaper:e202410

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from IESEG School of Management Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lies BOUTEN ().