Essays in Incomplete Information and Trade Policy

Strategic trade policy has been one of the most intensively researched areas in theory of industrial organization and international trade over the last three decades. The fundamental motivation is that governments adopt trade polices to confer strategic advantage to their respective domestic firms when firms are imperfectly competing with each other. However, most of existing literature focuses on markets with certainty and complete information among firms. This dissertation introduces incomplete information at industrial level into uncertainty markets in various trade models, and it also integrates the concept of option value from financial economics into equilibrium analysis. In Chapter 1, incomplete information at industrial level is introduced into an importing country model in which the domestic market demand is uncertain, and the policy is chosen before the uncertainty is resolved. Unlike the classical findings on the issue of equivalence of tariffs and quotas under certainty and complete information, it is shown that a tariff is superior to a quota regardless of the degree of uncertainty. Moreover, a prohibitive quota that results in autarky is always preferred to a quota at the free-trade level as long as quota is concerned. Chapter 2 studies the design of trade policies in an uncertain third market with incomplete information. It is shown that the country with firm having information disadvantage tends to choose the direct quantity control, while the country with well-informed firm would use export subsidy (export quota) when the degree of uncertainty is sufficiently high (low). Finally, Chapter 3 extends the conventional literature on strategic trade policy in reciprocal dumping model to the context that involves market demand uncertainty and incomplete information. Incomplete information at industrial level redistributes the option value associated with better information to the country with well-informed firm. As a result, both governments tend to choose tariffs over export subsidies in the Nash equilibrium of the simultaneous strategic trade policy games under complete and incomplete information. This yields a second best outcome. Moreover, Nash equilibrium outcome is shown to be inferior to free-trade outcome.