研討日期

2009年02月28日上午10:00 ~ 下午10:00

研討地點

台大社會科學院第四會議室

討論題目

題目

作者

文獻出處

Why parallel trade may raise producers' profits

Horst Raff and Nicolas Schmitt

Journal of International Economics 71 (2007) 434–447

 

報告人

蔡明芳

參加人員

梁文榮 馬道 陳玉晏 陳瑀屏 陳宏易 吳芝文 彭正浩 高國騟 蔡明芳 王佳琪 李朝功 楊雅博 曾靜枝 涂光億 王羿傑 林晏如 丁虹仁 周冰瑤 張麗娟 陳金盛 林大鈞 周品旭 吳宜謙

討論提要

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that circumstances exist under which it pays a manufacturer to allow distributors (hereafter called retailers) to engage in parallel trade, that is trade that is not directly controlled by the trademark, copyright or patent owner, generally the manufacturer himself. Moreover, we show that under these circumstances parallel trade—sometimes also referred to as gray markets—is typically welfare improving.

These results arise when four conditions are met. The first two are about the nature of the product: retailers have to place orders before they know the state of demand, and the products have little value at the end of the demand period (or equivalently, it is costly to maintain them as inventories). The other two conditions are about the demand: the states of demand have to be different across markets with positive probability, and different states of demand have to affect the quantity demanded rather than consumers' willingness to pay for the products.

結論

This paper shows that a manufacturer may benefit from parallel trade. In addition to an intuitive condition about the effect of demand shocks, this occurs when competitive retailers must order inventories before they know the realization of demand and for products whose sale value drops at the end of the demand period. For these types of products, letting retailers trade unsold inventories generally results in larger orders placed with the manufacturer and higher manufacturer profit. The model provides a simple explanation as to why the volume of parallel trade is now very large and accepted by manufacturers for some products such as automobiles, clothes, toys, consumer electronics, musical recordings, cosmetics and perfumes.

備註