| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺北大學 === 經濟學系 === 93 === The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the role of asymmetric transportation costs played in a spatial framework. When transportation costs are different between agents (a firm, consumers, or third-party carriers such as trucks and railways), the situation is called ''transportation asymmetry" in the context. The issues associated with transportation asymmetry are studied through three essays, which are organized into three chapters as follows.
The second chapter titled ''Incentive Consistency and the Choice of a Spatial Pricing Mode" extends Gronberg and Meyer''s results (1981, Journal of Regional Science) and shows that when freight rates are different between a firm and consumers, the firm (based on a profit-maximizing consideration) may adopt discriminatory pricing with an inefficient transport choice. This inefficient pricing behavior may not be consistent with the social optimum, whereby the problem of incentive inconsistency thus occurs. This chapter also provides a fiscal regime to remedy the inconsistent problem.
The third chapter titled ''Spillovers on Spatial Competition with General Purposeness Products" applies the Launhardt model (1885) extended by Dos Santos Ferreira and Thisse (1996) to investigate the impact of spillovers on the development of a product''s general purposeness, whereby the transportation cost is endogenized. Spillovers play different roles in response to different product-design configurations. Given the configuration of maximum horizontal product differentiation, spillovers increase firms'' equilibrium prices and profits, whereas in the case of minimum horizontal differentiation they reduce the prices and profits. The result also shows that spillovers affect negatively the degree of product differentiation along a costly (vertical) transportation dimension, implying that the principle of maximum-minimum product differentiation does not necessarily hold.
The fourth chapter titled ''Territorial Restrictions under Threat of Spatial Arbitrage" analyzes the incentives for the use of territorial restrictions. Under the restrictions, the price differentials between alternative territories may exceed the cost of cross-border shopping, which naturally causes the phenomenon of commodity arbitrage. However, an optimal design of a territorial-restriction contract is conducted to eliminate this problem. In equilibrium an upstream manufacturer''s profit from licensing retailers may be greater than that of fully monopolizing the market, hinging upon the transportation efficiency of its distributors. Since territorial restrictions are strongly connected to the efficiency of distributors, legal prohibitions against territorial restrictions may be inappropriate.
Through the above studies, one can further understand the importance that transportation asymmetry has played in the modern economy, which is the contribution of the dissertation.
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