The mininal core of strategic decisions a firm has to make is three-fold: What to produce? At which scale? At what price? A full-fledged theory of oligopolistic competition should be able to embrace these three dimensions jointly. Starting from the Cournot-Bertrand dispute and the stream of...

In the framework of consumer theory ala Lancaster, in which preferences are defined over bundles of characteristics embodied in goods rather than over goods themselves, a concept of "irrelevant" product differentiation is introduced and its relevance at equilibrium is analyzed. It is also argued...

This paper presents a spatial model to study imperfect competition with congestion. The model is used to examine the price and wage setting of subcenters of a city. Residents live in a city while they shop and work in subcentres. Each subcenter offers one differentiated product and one...

In a vertically differentiated oligopoly where the high quality variant of the good requires the use of the high quality labour (available in¯fixed supply) ¯firms may either all supply the same quality or di®erentiate their product. Only di®erentiated outcomes can be optimal, but the number...

This paper analyses price competition under product differentiation when goods are defined in a two dimensional characteristic space, and consumers do not know which firm sells which quality. Equilibrium prices consist of two additive terms, which balance consumers' relative valuation of goods'...

We consider a market in which a public firm competes against private ones, and ask what happens when the public firm is privatized. In the short run, privatization is harmful because prices rise: the disciplinary role of the public firm is lost. In the long run, privatization leads to further...

In this paper we consider a two-stage duopoly game where firms first decide whether to invest in advertising and then compete in prices. Advertising has two effects: a market enlargement for both firms and a predatory gain for the investing firm only. Both symmetric and asymmetric equilibria may...

In modern economies, the amount of profits distributed to shareholders is far from being negligible. We show that the way they are distributed among agents matters for the space-economy. For example, the existence of mobile rentiers is sufficient to make the symmetric configuration unstable for...

We study the design of antitrust intervention policy in presence of horizontally imperfectly differentiated industries. Firms in a given industry may decide to collude, but inter-industry collusion is assumed not to be possible. We find that the enforcement policy depends critically on the...