Chapter 2 Competitive Product Markets 20 Competition in the Short run and the Long Run One of the best examples of the workings of both price and nonprice competition is the market for hand calculators. Since the first model was introduced in the United States in 1969, the growth in sales, advancement in technology and design, the decline in prices in this market have been spectacular. The early calculators were simple—some did not even have a division key— and bulky by today’s standards. By 1976 they had shrunk from the size of a large paperback book to a tiny two by three-and-a-half inches for one model, and sales exceeded 16 million. While quality improved, prices fell. The first calculator, which Hewlett-Packard sold for $395, had an eight-digit display and performed only four basic functions—addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. By December 1971 Bowmar was offering an eight-digit, four- function model for $240. The next year, in an attempt to maintain its high prices, Hewlett- Packard introduced a sophisticated model that could perform many more functions, still for $395. By the end of the year, Bowmar, Sears, and other firms had broken the $100 barrier, and firms were offering built-in memories, AC adapters, and 1,500-hour batteries to shore up prices. At the year’s end, Casio announced a basic model for $59.95. In 1973 prices continued to fall. By the end of the year, National Semiconductor was offering a six-digit, four-function model for $29.95, and Hewlett-Packard had lowered the price of its special model by $100 and added extra features. In 1974, six-digit, four-function models sold for as little as $16.95. Eight-digit models that would have sold for over $300 three or four years earlier carried price tags of $19.95. By 1976 consumers could buy a six-digit model for just $6.95. All this happened during a period when prices in general rose at a rate unprecedented in the United States during peacetime. Thus the relative prices of calculators fell by even more than their dramatic price reductions suggest. Yet the drop in the price of calculators was to be expected. Although the high prices of the first calculators partly reflected high production costs, they also brought high profits and tempted many other firms into the industry. These new firms duplicated and then improved the existing technology and increased their productivity in order to beat the competition or avoid being beaten themselves. Firms unwilling to move with the competition quickly lost their share of the market. FIGURE 2.11 Long-Run Market for Calculators With supply and demand for calculators at D 1 and S 1 , the short-run equilibrium price and quantity will be P 2 and Q 1 . As existing firms expand production and new firms enter the industry, the supply curve shifts to S 2 . Simultaneously, an increase in consumer awareness of the product shifts the demand curve to D 2 . The resulting long-run equilibrium price and quantity are P 1 and Q 2 . Chapter 2 Competitive Product Markets 21 The increase in competition in the calculator market can be represented visually with supply and demand curves. Such an analysis permits us to observe long-run changes in market equilibrium. Given the limited technology and the small number of firms producing calculators in 1969, as well as restricted demand for this new product, let us assume that the supply and demand curves were initially S 1 and D 1 in Figure 2.12. The initial equilibrium price would then be P 2 and Q 1 . This is the short-run equilibrium. Short-run equilibrium is the price-quantity combination that will exist as long as producers do not have time to change their production facilities (or some resource that is fixed in the short run). Short-run equilibrium did not last long. In the years following 1969, firms expanded production, building new plants and converting facilities that had been producing other small electronic devices. Economies of scale resulted, and technological breakthrough lowered the cost of production still further. Several $150 circuits were reduced to very small $2 chips. The increased supply shifted the supply curve to the right, from S 1 to S 2 (see Figure 2.12). Meanwhile, because of advertising and word of mouth, people became familiar with the product and market demand increased, shifting the demand curve from D 1 to D 2 . Because supply increased more than demand, the price fell from P 2 to P 1 , and quantity rose from Q 1 to Q 2 . The new equilibrium price and quantity, P 1 and Q 2 , marked the new long-run market equilibrium. Long-run equilibrium is the price-quantity combination that will exist after firms have had time to change their production facilities (or some other resource that is fixed in the short run). FIGURE 2.12 Prices in the Long Run Chapter 2 Competitive Product Markets 22 If demand increases more than supply, the price will rise along with the quantity sold—panel (a). If supply keeps up with demand, however, the price will remain the same even though the quantity sold increases— panel (b). The market does not always move smoothly from the short run to the long run. Because firms do not know exactly what other firms are doing, or exactly what consumer demand will be, they may produce a product that cannot be sold at a price that will cover product costs. In fact, in the mid-1970s prices fell enough that several companies were losing money. Long-run improvements sometimes come at the expense of short-run losses. In this example, a long-run market adjustment causes a drop in price (because supply increased more than demand). The opposite can occur: demand can increase more than supply, causing a rise in the price and the quantity produced. In Figure 2.12(a), when the supply curve shifts to S 2 and the demand curve shifts to D 2 , price increases from P 1 to P 2 and quantity produced rises from Q 1 to Q 2 . Supply and demand may also adjust so that price remains constant while quantity increases (Figure 2.12(b)). Shortcomings of Competitive Markets Although the competitive markets may promote long-run improvements in product prices, quality, and output levels, it has deficiencies, and we must note several before closing. (Market deficiencies will be discussed further in later chapters.) First, the competitive market process can be quite efficient because production is maximized. Consumer demand, however, depends on the way income is distributed. If market forces or government programs distort income distribution, the demand for goods and services will also be distorted. If, for example, income is concentrated in the hands of a few, the demand for luxury items will be high, but the demand for household appliances and new housing will be low. In such a situation, the results of competition may be efficient in a strict economic sense, but whether these results are socially desirable is a matter of values—of normative, rather than positive, economics. Second, the outcome of competition will not be efficient to the extent that production costs are imposed on people who do not consume a product. People whose house paint peels because of industrial pollution bear a portion of the offending firm’s production cost, whether or not they buy its product. At the same time, the price consumers pay for the product is lower than it would be if the producer incurred all costs, including pollution costs. Because of the low price, consumers will buy more than the efficient quantity. In a sense, this is an example of overproduction. Because all the costs of production have not been included in the producer’s cost calculations, the price is artificially low. Third, in a free market, competition can promote socially undesirable products or services. A competitive market in an addictive drug like alcohol or heroin can lead to lower prices and greater quantities consumed -- and thus an increase in social problems associated Chapter 2 Competitive Product Markets 23 with addition. Competition can be desirable only when it promotes the production of things people consider beneficial, but what is beneficial is a matter of values. Fourth, opponents of the market system contend that competition sometimes leads to “product proliferation” -- too many versions of essentially the same product, such as aspirin— and to waste in production and advertisement. Because so many types of the same product are available, production of each takes place on a very small scale, and no plant is fully utilized. This may be true. The validity of this objection, however, hinges on whether the range of choice in products compensates for the inefficiencies in production. The question is whether firms should be forced to standardize their products and to compete solely in terms of price. What about people who want something different from the standard product? Fifth, unscrupulous competitors can take advantage of customers’ ignorance. A competitor may employ unethical techniques, such a circulating false information about rivals or using bait-and-switch promotional tactics (advertising very low-priced, low-quality products to attract customers and to switch them to higher-priced products when they get into the store). Competition can control some of these abuses. For instance, competitors will generally let consumers know when their rivals are misrepresenting their products. Still, fraudulent sellers can move from one market to another, keeping one step ahead of their reputations. MANAGER’S CORNER: Paying Above-Market Wages 5 This chapter has been about how “markets” do things like set product prices and production levels through the forces of competition. However, markets don’t operate by themselves. Real live people are involved who sometimes seem to do things that defy conventional market explanation. Take, for example, Henry Ford who is remembered for his organizational inventiveness (the assembly line) and for his presumption that he could ignore the wishes of his customers (as in his claim that he was willing to give buyers any color car they wanted so long as it was black!). However, he outdid himself when it came to workers; he seemed to want to deny the control of the market when it came to setting his workers’ wages. Did he really? In 1914, he stunned his board of directors by proposing to raise his workers’ wages to $3 a day, a third higher than the going wage ($2.20 a day) in the Detroit automobile industry at the time. When one of his board members wondered out loud why he was not considering giving workers even more, a wage of $4 or $5 a day, Ford quickly agreed to go to $5, more than twice the prevailing market wage. Why? 5 Reprinted from Richard B. McKenzie and Dwight R. Lee, Managing Through Incentives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), chap. 6. Chapter 2 Competitive Product Markets 24 An answer to why Ford paid more than the prevailing wage won’t be found on the pages of standard economics textbooks. 6 In those texts, wages are determined by market conditions, namely, the forces of supply and demand, and demand and supply (often depicted by intersecting lines on a graph) are locked in place, that is, are not affected by how, or how much, workers are paid. The supply of labor is determined by what workers are willing to do, while the demand for labor is determined by the combined forces of worker productivity and the prices that can be charged for what the workers produce. The curves are more or less stationary (at least in the way they are presented), certainly not subject to manipulation by employers and their policies. In the competitive framework, the “market wage” will settle where the market clears, or where the number of workers who are demanded by employers exactly equals the number of workers who are willing to work. And, once more, no profit-hungry employer (at least in the textbook discussions) would ever pay above (or below) market. For that matter, in standard textbooks, employers in competitive markets are unable to pay anything other than the market wage, given competition. If employers ever tried to pay more, they could be underpriced by other producers who paid less, the market wage. If employers paid below market, they would not be able to hire employees and would be left without products to sell. There are two problems with that perspective from the point of view of this book. First, we don’t wish to assume away the problem of policy choices. On the contrary, we want to discuss how policies might affect worker productivity, or how employers might achieve maximum productivity from workers. We seek a rationale for Ford’s dramatic wage move, if there is one to be found. In doing so, we don’t deny that productivity affects worker wages, which is a well-established theoretical proposition in economics. What we insist on is that the reverse is also true -- worker wages affect productivity -- for very good economic reasons. Second, a problem with standard market theory is that there is a lot of real-world experience that does not seem to fit the simple supply and demand model. Granted, the standard model is highly useful for discussing how wages might change with movements in the forces of supply and demand. From that framework, we can appreciate, for example, why wages move up when the labor demand increases (which can be attributable to productivity and/or price increases). At the same time, many employers have followed Ford’s lead and have paid more than market wages. All one has to do to check out that claim is to watch how many workers put in applications when a plant announces it is hiring. Sometimes, the lines stretch for blocks from the plant door. When the departments of history or English in our universities have an open professorship, the departments can expect a hundred or more qualified applicants. The U.S. Postal Service regularly receives far more applications for its carrier jobs than it has jobs available. When Boeing came to Los Angeles in late 1996 to hire workers, the line-up at the work fair stretched for blocks down the street; the end, in fact, could not be seen from the door. These queues cannot be explained by market clearing wages. 6 Our discussion on the Ford pay increase is heavily dependent on a book by Stephen Meyer, The Five- Dollar Day: Labor, Management, and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921 (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1981). Chapter 2 Competitive Product Markets 25 Consider the persistence of unemployment. The traditional view of labor markets would predict that the wage should be expected to fall until the market clears and the only evident unemployment should be transitory, encompassing people who are not working because they are between jobs or are looking for jobs. But “involuntary unemployment” abounds and persists, which must be attributable, albeit partially, to paying workers “too much” (or above the market-clearing wage rate). We don’t pretend to provide a complete explanation for “overpaying” workers here. It may be that employers overpay their workers for some psychological reasons. Overpaying workers might make the employers feel good about themselves and their employees, which can show up in greater loyalty, longer job tenure, and harder and more dedicated work. The above-market wages may also remove workers’ financial strains, leaving them with fewer problems at home and more energy to devote themselves to their jobs. While we think these can be important considerations, we prefer to look for other reasons, mainly as a means of improving incentives for workers to do as the employer wants. As it turns out, Henry Ford was not offering his workers something extra for nothing in return. He wanted to “overpay” his workers primarily because he could then demand more of them. He could work them harder and longer, and he did. He could also be more selective in the people he hired, which could be a boon to all Ford workers. Workers could reason that they would be working with more highly qualified cohorts, all of whom would be forced to devote themselves to their jobs more energetically and productively. Some, if not all, of the wage would be returned in the form of greater production and sales and even greater job security for workers. But there were other benefits for Ford. When workers are paid exactly their market wage, there is little cost to quitting. A worker making his market (or opportunity) wage can simply drop his job and move on to the next job with no loss in income. And, as was the case, Ford’s workers were quitting with great frequency. In 1913, Ford had an employee turnover rate of 370 percent! That year, the company had to hire 52,000 workers to maintain a workforce of 13,600 workers. The company estimated that hiring a worker costs from $35 to $70, and even then they were hard to control. For example, before the pay raise, the absentee rate at Ford was 10 percent. Workers could stay home from work, more or less when they wanted, with virtually no threat of penalty. Given that they were being paid market wage, the cost of their absenteeism was low to the workers. In effect, workers were buying a lot of absent days from work. It was a bargain. They could reason that if they were only receiving the “market wage rate,” then that wage rate could be replaced elsewhere if they were ever fired for misbehaving on the job. At any one time, most workers were new at their job. Shirking was rampant. Ford complained that “the undirected worker spends more time walking about for tools and material than he does working; he gets small pay because pedestrianism is not a highly paid line.” In order to control workers, the company figured that the firm had to create some buffer between itself and the fluidity of a “perfectly” functioning labor market. Chapter 2 Competitive Product Markets 26 The nearly $3 Ford paid above the market was, in effect, a premium he had to pay in order to enforce the strict rules for employment eligibility he imposed. Ford’s so-called Sociology Department was staffed by investigators who, after the pay hike, made frequent home visits and checked into workers’ savings plan, marital happiness, alcohol use, and moral conduct, as well as their work habits on the job. He was effectively paying for the right to make those checks, and he made the checks in part because he thought they were the right thing to do, but also because the checks would lead to more productive workers. Ford was also paying for obedience. He is quoted as saying after the pay hike, “I have a thousand men who if I say ‘Be at the northeast corner of the building at 4 a.m.’ will be there at 4 a.m. That’s what we want -- obedience.” 7 Whether he got obedience or allegiance may be disputed. What is not disputable is that he got dramatic results. In 1915, the turnover rate was 16 percent -- down from 370 percent -- and productivity increased about 50 percent. It should be pointed out that control over workers is only part of the problem. Even if a boss has total control, there must be some way of knowing what employees should be doing to maximize their contribution to the firm. That wasn’t a difficult problem for Ford. On the assembly line, it was obvious what Ford wanted his workers to do, and it was relatively easy to spot shirkers. According to David Halberstam in his book The Reckoning, there was small chance for the shirker to prosper in the Ford plant. After the plant was mechanized and the $5- a-day policy was implemented, foremen were chosen largely for physical strength. According to Halberstam, “If a worker seemed to be loitering, the foreman simply knocked him down.” 8 Given that the high wage attracted many applicants, Ford’s workers simply had to put up with the abuse and threat of abuse, or be replaced. The line outside the employment office was a strong signal to workers. Of course, this type of heavy-handed control doesn’t work in every work environment. When productivity requires that workers possess a lot of specialized knowledge that they must exercise creatively or in response to changing situations, heavy-handed enforcement tactics may not work effectively. Indeed, the threat can undermine creativity and productivity. How is a manager to know whether a research chemist, a creator of software, or a manager, is behaving in ways that make the best use of his talents in promoting the objectives of the firm? Do you knock them down if they gaze out the window? Managers typically provide a subtler incentive program than a high daily salary and a tough foreman. The big problem is controlling employees who have expertise you lack. 7 David Halberstam, The Reckoning (New York: Avon Books, 1986), p. 94. 8 Ibid. Chapter 2 Competitive Product Markets 27 One way to inspire effort from those who can’t be monitored directly on a daily basis is to “overpay” workers, and ensure that they suffer a cost in the event that their performance, as measured over time, is not adequate. The “overpayment” gives workers a reason to avoid being fired or demoted for such reasons as lack of performance and excessive shirking. Even when shirking is hard to detect, the threat of losing a well-paying job can be sufficient to motivate diligent effort. 9 Many workers are in positions of responsibility, meaning that they have control over firm resources (real and financial) that they typically use with discretion -- and can also misuse, or appropriate for their own uses. Their actions are also difficult to monitor. Misuse of funds may only infrequently be discovered. How should such employees be paid? More than likely, they should be “overpaid.” That is, they should be paid more than their market wage as a way of imposing a cost on them if their misuse of funds -- especially, their dishonesty -- is ever uncovered. The expected lost “excess wages” must exceed the potential (discounted) value of the misused funds. The less likely the employees are to be found out, the greater the overpayment must be in order for the cost to be controlling. For example, assume a person receives a wage premium of $100 because he or she is in a position of trust and has control over firm resources. If the person can expect to be discovered one out of every ten times he steals firm property, at which point he will lose his job and his wage premium, the employee would assess the expected cost of theft at $10 per instance. The person who expected to be caught much less frequently, say, one out of every 100 times, would assess the expected cost at $1. To balance the expected cost in the two instances, the wage premium would have to be higher in the latter case (or $1,000). Of course, it naturally follows that, given the probability of being caught, the more a person can steal from the firm (or the more firm resources the employee can misuse or misdirect), the greater must the wage premium be to have the same deterrent effect. Why do managers of branch banks make more than bank tellers? One reason is that the managers’ talents are scarcer than tellers’ are. That is a point frequently drawn from standard labor-market theorizing. We add here two additional factors: First, the manager is very likely in a position to misuse, or just steal, more firm resources than is each individual teller. Second, the manager’s actions are less likely to be discovered than the teller’s. The manager usually has more discretion than each teller does, and the manager has one less level of supervision. 9 See J. Bulow and Lawrence Summers, “A Theory of Dual Labor Markets with Applications to Industrial Policy, Discrimination and Keynesian Unemployment,” Journal of Labor Economics, vol. 4 (no. 3, July 1986), pp. 376-414; and C. Shapiro and Joseph Stiglitz, “Equilibrium Unemployment as a Worker Discipline Device,” American Economic Review, vol. 74, no. 3 (June 1984), pp. 433-444. So-called “equity theory,” based in psychology, suggests that worker over-payment can lead to greater performance because the overpaid workers perceive an inequity in pay among their relevant peers. As a consequence, they seek to redress the overpayment by working longer and harder. Of course, the theory also suggests that underpaid workers will respond by working less diligently and putting in less time. See Edward E. Lawler, III, “Equity Theory as a Predictor of Productivity and Work Quality,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 70 (no. 6, December 1968), pp. 596- 610. Chapter 2 Competitive Product Markets 28 Why does pay escalate with rank within organizations? There are myriad reasons, several of which will be covered later. We suggest here that as managers move up the corporate ladder, they typically acquire more and more responsibility, gain more discretion over more firm resources, and have more opportunities to misuse firm resources. In order to deter the misuse of firm resources, the firm needs to increase the threat of penalty for any misuse, which implies a higher and higher wage premium for each step on the corporate ladder. Workers in the bowels of their corporations often feel that the people in the executive suite are drastically “overpaid,” given that their pay appears to be out of line with what they do. To a degree, the workers are right. People in the executive suite are often paid a premium simply to deter them from misusing the powers of the executive suite. The workers should not necessarily resent the overpayments. The overpayments may be the most efficient way available for making sure that firm resources are used efficiently. To the extent that the overpayments work, the jobs of people at the bottom of the corporate ladder can be more productive, better paying, and more secure. We have not covered all possible reasons workers are not paid strictly as suggested by simple supply and demand curve analysis. Nevertheless, the Ford case permits us to make two general points: First, moving decisions away from the impersonal forces of the marketplace and into the more personal forces inside a firm, with long-term relational contracts, can increase efficiency by reducing transaction costs. And, second, the decisions made on how the firms organize their “overpayments” can have important consequences for the efficiency of production because workers can have a greater incentive to invest “sweat equity” in their firms and to become more productive. The firm that gets the “overpayment” right (and exactly what it should be cannot be settled in theory) can gain a competitive advantage over rivals. Apparently, Ford secured an important advantage by going, in a sense, “off market.” Should workers accept “overpayment”? Better yet, is a greater overpayment always better for workers? The natural tendency is to answer with a firm, “Yes!” Well, we think a more cautious answer is in order, “Maybe” or, again, “It depends.” Workers would be well advised to carefully assess what is expected of them, immediately and down the road. High pay means employers can make greater demands -- in terms of the scope and intensity of work assignments -- on their employees. This is because of the cost they will bear if they do not consent to the demands. Clearly, workers should expect that their employers will demand value equal to, if not above, the wage payments, and workers should consider whether they contribute as much to their firms’ coffers as they take. Otherwise, their job tenure may be tenuous. The value of a job is ultimately equal to how much the workers can expect to earn over time, appropriately adjusted for the fact that future payments are not worth as much to workers as current ones are and for the fact that uncertain payments are not worth as much as certain payments. A high paying job that is lost almost immediately for inadequate performance may be a poor deal for employees. To make this point with focus in our classes, we have often told our MBA students that they are unlikely to be offered upon graduation salaries at the high end of the executive level. Chapter 2 Competitive Product Markets 29 However, if by some chance they were offered such a salary -- say, $250,000 a year -- they should seriously consider turning it down. We suggest that most should probably consider jobs with annual salaries more in the range of $50,000 to $70,000, something close to whatever is the going market wage for their graduate school cohorts. Our students are generally startled by our brazen suggestion. Why should any sane person turn down such a lucrative offer, if a sane employer tendered it? An answer is not all that mysterious. Unless a new graduate is able and willing to return $250,000 a year in value, he or she would be unlikely to retain such a high paying job for very long. The person who quickly fails at a high salary can end up doing far worse than the person who begins her career by succeeding at a more modest salary. The point that emerges from such a discussion and needs to be remembered is that the actual extent of the “overpayment” will not be determined solely by employers, as was true with Ford in 1913. Employees will also have a say. They have an interest in limiting the overpayment in order to limit the demands placed on them and to increase their job security. That is to say, the extent of the “overpayment” is, itself, determined by negotiation, if not market forces, with the wage pressures not always in the way expected. The pay negotiations can involve the workers pressing for a lower overpayment while the employer presses for the opposite. Along this line, we have seriously suggested in another book (but with little hope of being taken seriously by political operatives) that members of Congress should not have control over their own pay. 10 By restricting their overpayment, they thwart the competition for their jobs and increase their job security -- and the current value of being in Congress. As opposed to cutting their pay in order to reduce the net value of being in Congress, we suggest it might be a wiser course to increase the members’ pay rather dramatically to, say, half a million a year. That could increase the competition in congressional races, increase the quality of candidates who run, and undercut the job security for members of Congress. At the same time, the higher pay could make members far more responsive to voter interests than the current pay does by imposing formula driven reductions in their pay if deficits or inflation exceed specified levels. Firms might also “overpay” their workers because they have “underpaid” their workers early in their careers. The “overpayments” are not so much “excess payments” as they are “repayments” of wages forgone early in the workers’ careers. Of course, the workers would not likely forgo wages unless they expected their delayed overpayments to include interest on the wages forgone. So, the delayed overpayments must exceed underpayments by the applicable interest market interest rate. In such cases, the firms are effectively using their workers as sources of capital. The workers themselves become venture capitalist of an important kind. Why would firms do that? Some new firms must do it just to get started. They don’t have access to all of the capital they need in their early years, given their product or service has 10 Dwight R. Lee and Richard B. McKenzie, Regulating Government: A Preface to Constitutional Economics (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987), pp. 157-162. . market explanation. Take, for example, Henry Ford who is remembered for his organizational inventiveness (the assembly line) and for his presumption that. be returned in the form of greater production and sales and even greater job security for workers. But there were other benefits for Ford. When workers