研討日期

2007年11月24日上午09:30 ~ 下午12:30

研討地點

台大社會科學院第一會議室

討論題目

題目

作者

文獻出處

Counterfeiting and Enforcement

蔡明芳

邱俊榮

Working paper

報告人

蔡明芳

參加人員

林燕淑、陳宏易、周冰瑤、高國峰、彭正浩、涂光億、王佳琪、蔡明芳。

討論提要

This paper establishes a short run model which takes both counterfeit and government’s enforcement into consideration.  We first discuss the impacts of counterfeiting on market competition, output of the original firm and its price level, consumer surplus and social welfare, and also investigate the effect of enforcement on counterfeiters.  We will compare our results with those from Grossman and Shapiro (1988) and Banerjee (2003).  This study also assumes that counterfeiters can enter/exit the market freely.  As long as there is a positive profit, the behavior of counterfeiting will continue.  Unlike Higgins and Rubin (1986), we believe that it is less likely that the original product and its counterfeits have the same quality.  It is quite often the case that counterfeits are inferior to the original products.  In fact, our study indicates that the improvement of counterfeit’s quality can have an interestingly unpredictable effect on the original product.  Furthermore, under these settings, we try to analyze the influence of counterfeiting on the original firm’s behavior on pricing and outputs, and also compare the influence of government enforcement on counterfeiting and social welfare to the results from Grossman and Shapiro (1988) and Banerjee (2003).

結論

This paper concludes that as long as counterfeiting may occur, sales of the original product could either increase or decrease.  The results of analysis on welfare are shown as follows.  Firstly, a strict enforcement by government may either increase or decrease welfare.  Secondly, when counterfeiting emerges, welfare under a stricter enforcement is not necessarily larger than that without enforcement.  Finally, an enforcement which is strict enough can still improve welfare even there is a relatively high enforcement cost.

延伸研究

The model we use could also be applied to the R&D activity of original manufacturers.  As it is commonly known, counterfeiting normally lowers the incentive of R&D for the original firms.  Thus, we can further investigate whether counterfeiting causes the expenditure of R&D to decrease.

備註