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What happens if an employer cuts wages by one cent? Much of labor economics is built on the assumption that all the workers will quit immediately. Here, Alan Manning mounts a systematic challenge to the standard model of perfect competition.Monopsony in Motionstands apart by analyzing labor markets from the real-world perspective that employers have significant market (or monopsony) power over their workers. Arguing that this power derives from frictions in the labor market that make it time-consuming and costly for workers to change jobs, Manning re-examines much of labor economics based on this alternative and equally plausible assumption. The book addresses the theoretical implications of monopsony and presents a wealth of empirical evidence. Our understanding of the distribution of wages, unemployment, and human capital can all be improved by recognizing that employers have some monopsony power over their workers. Also considered are policy issues including the minimum wage, equal pay legislation, and caps on working hours. In a monopsonistic labor market, concludes Manning, the \"free\" market can no longer be sustained as an ideal and labor economists need to be more open-minded in their evaluation of labor market policies.Monopsony in Motionwill represent for some a new fundamental text in the advanced study of labor economics, and for others, an invaluable alternative perspective that henceforth must be taken into account in any serious consideration of the subject.

Employers often rely on informal controls such as trust to motivate organizationally desirable behaviors from their workers by appealing to the latter's reciprocity. Notably, trust and reciprocity can promote a \"gift exchange\" between employers and workers. Using an experiment, I investigate whether labor market competition moderates the emergence of a gift exchange in labor markets in which signing bonus offers serve as a potential signal of trust and the duration of the employment relationship is endogenously determined. I find that offering a signing bonus more positively affects both workers' beliefs about the employer's trust in them and their effort when there is an excess supply of workers than when there is an excess demand for workers. I also find that the initial effects of signing bonuses may not persist over time. Additional analyses suggest that both employers' and workers' expectations may affect whether and how trust and reciprocity develop over time.

Combinatorial auctions allow for more expressive bidding in which participants can submit package bids with logical constraints that limit allowable outcomes. This type of auction can be useful when participants' values are complementary or when participants have production and financial constraints. However, combinatorial auctions are currently rare in practice. The main problems confronted in implementing these auctions are that they have computational uncertainty (i.e., there is no guarantee that the winning bids for such an auction can be found in a \"reasonable\" amount of time when the number of bidders and items becomes larger) and that the auction is cognitively complex and can lead participants to pursue perverse bidding strategies. This article describes a type of combinatorial auction that, during laboratory testing, eliminated these problems and produced extremely efficient outcomes.

We examine how different characteristics of product demand and market impact the relative sales volume in the forward and spot markets for a commodity whose aggregate demand is uncertain. In a setting where either the forward contracts are binding quantity commitments between buyers and suppliers or the forward production takes place before the uncertainty in demand is resolved, we find that a combination of factors that include market concentration, demand risk, and price elasticity of demand will determine whether a commodity will be sold mainly through forward contracts or in the spot market. Previous findings in the literature show that when participants are risk neutral, the ratio of forward sales to spot sales is a function of market concentration alone; also, the lower the concentration, the higher this ratio. These findings hold under the assumption that demand is either deterministic or, if demand is uncertain, all production takes place after uncertainty is fully resolved and production plans can be altered instantaneously and costlessly. In our setting, however, we find that even a low level of demand risk can reverse the nature of supply in a highly competitive (low concentration) market, by shifting it from predominantly forward-driven to predominantly spot-driven supply. In markets with high concentration, the price elasticity of demand will determine whether the supply will be predominantly spot-driven or forward-driven. Our analysis suggests various new hypotheses on the structure of supply in commodity markets. This paper was accepted by Martin Lariviere, operations management.

Mango is one of the most favorable tropical fruits grown and consumed in several parts of the world. However, there is overproduction during the ripening stage. In this situation, appropriate techniques are needed to utilize the abundant supply. Pickling is one of the oldest and most successful methods for preserving mango. In this study, mango pickles were prepared by using chemical pickling assisted with pulsed electric field (PEF). The physicochemical and textural properties of mango pickles prepared with PEF at 30 and 50 °Brix were studied in comparison with the conventional pickling process. The water loss, solids gain, and diffusion efficiency were increased by twofold when PEF was applied in pickling Thai mango variety Chok-anan. This process also reduced the moisture content and water activity. The PEF-assisted pickling process caused changes in lightness (L*) and redness (a*) values. The textural properties of the mango pickles produced by the PEF-assisted pickling process were also changed. In addition, the PEF-assisted pickling process caused a 20% increase in beta-carotene content and a 47% decrease in ascorbic acid content. The microstructure of the mango was more disintegrated on the surface after PEF than that from the conventional pickling process.

We model oligopolistic firms, producing substitutes, who compete for inputs from capacity constrained suppliers in a decentralized market. Compared to a price-taking input market, the incentive to foreclose downstream competitors leads to higher input prices and to a higher aggregate amount of input acquired. This novel feature mitigates the output reducing effect of downstream market power and may even restore efficiency in the unique (input) market clearing equilibrium. Other equilibria, where firms coordinate on which suppliers to target, result in excess supply (involuntary unemployment, if input is labor) and even higher input prices. Our insights generalize to alternative vertical structures.

While the hedonic property value model and recently developed computable general equilibrium urban models assume the housing market is in equilibrium, recent years have witnessed extreme circumstances such as large changes in housing prices, high levels of mortgage default, and high levels of foreclosure that bring into question this assumption. This highlights the need for a better understanding of the dynamics of the housing market and the mechanisms that drive and sustain periods of disequilibrium. In this analysis, I develop a dynamic model of the housing market where vacancies naturally arise as the error correction mechanism. I estimate this model using annual U.S. panel data at the MSA level for 1990–2011. The results show that when there is excess demand, prices rise when vacancies fall but prices do not fall when there is excess supply and vacancies rise. This is consistent with the belief that prices are sticky downwards and hence prolong housing downturns. On the other hand, when there is excess supply, there is a relatively stronger decline in new housing in response to a rise in vacancies and much less of a new housing reaction when there is excess demand and vacancies fall. Furthermore, when I allow for a structural shift in the housing market brought on by the Great Recession (2006–2011), I find that the housing market became more responsive on both sides – excess supply and demand – during this period.

We analyze the core of a class of coalition formation game in which every player's payoff depends only on the members of her coalition. We first consider anonymous games and additively separable games. Neither of these strong properties guarantee the existence of a core allocation, even if additional strong properties are imposed. We then introduce two top-coalition properties each of which guarantee the existence. We show that these properties are independent of the Scarf-balancedness condition. Finally we give several economic applications.

We study how two dimensions of market conditions affect behaviour in experimental gift-exchange markets with repeated interaction. First, we consider the impact of competitive imbalance, by varying whether there is an excess supply of firms or an excess supply of workers in the market. Second, we impose a minimum wage in the market with an excess supply of workers, and study the overall effect on wages and productivity. Perhaps surprisingly, the state of competition does not appear to have strong effects in our data; however, there is some evidence of lower productivity when a minimum wage is imposed.