In this paper, we extend the concept of stability to vertical collusive agreements, involving downstream and upstream firms, using a setup of successive Cournot oligopolies. We show that a stable vertical agreement always exists: the unanimous vertical agreement involving all downstream and...

When the production of high quality needs the employment of qualified labour, firms' decisions concerning quality are affected by the extent to which skills are abundant. By means of a comparison between monopoly and perfect competition, we show how market power in such a context may entail a...

The purpose on this paper is twofold. First, we present an alternative model of agglomeration and trade that displays the main features of the recent economic geography literature while allowing for the derivation of analytical results by means of simple algebra. Second, we show how this...

We consider the following stage game: a domestic government chooses an import quota, the a domestic and a foreign firm choose their quality level before engaging a price competition. We first show that the indirect effect of the quota on the sales of the domestic producer are different depending...

In this paper we consider a model of oligopolistic competition where firms make a two-dimensional product line decision. They choose a location in style space, thus, inducing horizontal differentiation, and produce different qualities (a product line) of a given good (vertical differentiation),...

We analyse the problem of a non-producing patentee who licenses an essential process innovation to a vertical Cournot oligopoly. The vertical oligopoly is composed of an upstream and a downstream sector which may differ in their efficiency or, in other words, in the benefit they derive from the...

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...

We develop a model of monopolistic competition that accounts for consumers' heterogeneity in both incomes and preferences. This model makes it possible to study the implications of income redistribution on the toughness of competition. We show how the market outcome depends on the joint...

This paper studies equilibrium merging behavior in composite good industries. Component producers face the option to either merge with a similar component producer (horizontal merger) or a complementary one (complementary merger) of a composite good. Focusing only on strategic reasons,...

We consider an economic geography model of a new genre: all firms and workers are mobile and their agglomeration within a city generates rising urban costs through competition on a land market. When commuting costs are low (high), the industry tends to be agglomerated (dispersed). With two...