Franchise fee, contract bargaining, and economic growth

This paper combines the industrial organization (IO) theory and the R&D-based endogenous growth theory in a model of a successive imperfect competitive economy. The current study assumes that firms between upstream and downstream industries bargain over both the price of intermediate goods and the franchise fee. Findings show that the intermediate goods firm with a R&D sector charges the price equal to the marginal cost. Economic rent may also be partly transferred into the franchise fee determined by the relative bargaining power. In particular, the traditional double marginalization result, such as in Spengler (1950), does not take place here due to the above-mentioned bargaining scheme. Finally, this work shows that final goods firms in vertically linked industries play an important role in an economic growth model. The more bargaining power the final goods firms have (or the more returns to specialization upstream firms have, or the less substitution elasticity the final goods have), the more the economy grows. However, the consumer preference for diversity seemingly does not affect economic growth rate.