This paper studies communication in a static Cournot duopoly model under the assumption that the firms have unverifiable private information about their costs. We investigate the conditions under which the firms cannot transmit any information through cheap talk, and show that when these...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a simple model to explain buyer–supplier relationships and identify factors that determine the chosen number of trading partners. We show that the optimal number of partners for a supplier is small, if it has low bargaining power, moderate economies of...

We study the evolution of imitation behaviour in a differentiated market where firms are located equidistantly on a (Salop) circle. Firms choose price and quantity simultaneously, leaving open the possibility for non-market-clearing outcomes. The strategy of the most successful firm is imitated....

Research in experimental economics has cogently challenged the fundamental precept of neoclassical economics that economic agents optimize. The last two decades have seen elaboration of boundedly rational models that try to move away from the optimization approach, in ways consistent with...

We study experimentally voluntary contributions to public goods when none, some, or all previous decisions are observable. When agents observe previous moves, they tend to condition their cooperation on observed cooperation. This leads to two effects of increased transparency: on the one hand,...

This paper examines an international mixed model in which a domestic state-owned welfare-maximizing public firm competes against a foreign labor-managed income-per-worker-maximizing private firm. In the first stage, each firm independently decides whether or not to make a commitment to capacity....

This paper examines the effectiveness of the wage-rise-contract policy as a strategic commitment in a two-stage quantity-settingmodel with two labor-managed income-per-worker-maximizing firms. The policy is a promise by the firm that it will announce acertain output level and a wage premium...

We study a market model in which competing firms use costly marketing devices to influence the set of alternatives which consumers perceive as relevant. Consumers in our model are boundedly rational in the sense that they have an imperfect perception of what is relevant to their decision...

This paper studies firms' incentives to commit to transparent behavior in a competitive procedure modeled as an asymmetric information beauty contest managed by a corrupt agent. In his evaluation of firms' offers for a public contract the agent has some discretion to favor a firm in exchange for...

In a quantity-competition oligopoly, previous studies have shown that a price-taking firm can outperform any rival with identical technology that produces at a different output level at any intertemporal equilibrium. This research seeks to examine this seemingly counter-intuitive fact in a...