We consider a model of licensing of a non-drastic innovation in which the patent holder (an outside innovator) negotiates either up-front fixed fees or per-unit royal- ties with two firms producing horizontally differentiated brands and competing à la Cournot. We investigate how licensing...

Within the framework proposed by Mussa and Rosen (1978) for modelling quality differentiation, we allow consumers to buy simultaneously different variants of the same indivisible good. We call this the "joint purchase option". We show that this option dramatically affects price competition:...

This paper faces two questions concerning Joint Ventures (JV) agreements. First, we study how the partners contribution affect the creation and the profit sharing of a JV when partners' effort is not observable. Then, we see whether such agreements are easier to enforce when the decision on JV...

For Bertrand duopoly with linear costs, we establish via a single counterexample that: (i) A new monotone transformation of the firms' profit functions may lead to the supermodularity of transformed profits when the standard log and identity transformations both fail, and (ii) Topkis's notion of...

This paper shows that the adoption of flexible manufacturing techniques by firms leads to a tougher price regime. This need not benefit consumers since the tougher regime deters entry and facilitates segmented market structures. The ability of flexible manufacturing to deter entry is moderated...

We provide an extensive and general investigation of the effecst on industry performance - profits, social welfare and price-cost margins - of exogenously changing the number of firms in Cournot markets. This includes an in-depth exploration of the well-known trade-off between competition and...

We investigate the effects of market transparency on prices in the Bertrand duopoly model for both the cases of strategic complementarities and strategic substitutes. For the former class of games “conventional wisdom” concerning prices is confirmed, since they decrease. The consumers are...

In a successive vertical oligopoly, a set of "sellers" produce some input to be transformed into a final product by a set of "buyers". On this two-sided market, a firm's profit increases with the number of firms of the other type and decreases with the number of firms of its own type. We examine...

This contribution investigates the effictiveness and welfare implications of fiscal policies in a context of multilateral trade, when traders behave strategically. The present approach deals simultaneously with two aspects of fiscal policies: collecting resources for redistributive purposes and...

In the framework of symmetric Cournot oligopoly, this paper provides two minimal sets of assumptions on the demand and cost functions that imply respectively that, as the number of firms increases, the minimal and maximal equilibria lead to (i) decreasing industry price and increasing or...