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...

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...

In this paper, we address the incentives to invest in environmental innovation of enterprises that exercise market power in the output market and also buy and sell pollution permits. Differently from the existing literature, using a market approach we explicitly model the interaction between the...

This paper first introduces an approach relying on market games to examine how successive oligopolies do operate between downstream and upstream markets. This approach is then compared with the traditional analysis of oligopolistic interaction in successive markets. The market outcomes resulting...

I consider a two period model with an incumbent firm and a potential entrant each of whom produces a homogeneous good. There is a demand uncertainty: it can be high or low and it realizes in the second period. The question I ask: How by choosing capacity at an earlier period of actual production...

Media industries are important drivers of popular culture. A large fraction of leisure time is devoted to radio, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, and television (the illustrative example henceforth). Most advertising expenditures are incurred for these media. They are also mainly supported...

We consider the two-stage game proposed by Kreps and Scheinkman [83] in the address model of horizontal differentiation developed by Hotelling. Firms choose capacities in the first stage and then compete in price. We show that capacity precommitment softens price competition drastically. In...

This paper considers a model of district formation that incorporates a notion of regional industrial systems. Each firm chooses its location from the set of existing industrial districts. The heterogeneous firms are distinguished by its "stand alone" district-dependent production and...

An infinite-horizon, stochastic model of entry and exit with sunk costs and imperfect competition is constructed. Simple examples provide insights into: (1) the relationship between sunk costs and industry concentration, (2) entry when current profits are negative, and (3) the relationship...