We investigate how differences in set-up costs of various types affect the trade-off between global effciency and spatial equity and show that the standard assumption of symmetry in fixed costs masks the existence of an interesting effect: the range of available varieties varies depends on the...

Both product differentiation through quality and capacity commitment have been shown to relax price competition. However, they have not been considered simultaneously. To this end we consider a three stage game where firms choose quality then commit to capacity and finally compete in price.

We propose a model representing a newspaper producer suppying a product which can be acquired by the readers either every day per one unit at a time, or by subscription. The population of potentil buyers is differenciated according to the frequency at which they want to read the newspaper.

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...

This paper tackles the issue of optimum product diversity in an imperfectly competitive market with small of large firms. First, it develops a quadratic utility model of monopolistic competition with horizontal product differentiation which avoids some of the main pitfalls of the S-D-S approach....

Presidential address for the Twelfth World Congress of the International Economic Association, summarising semi-formally the author's recent work and concerns. Uncertainty and incomplete markets breed demand volatility as well as price and wage rigidities. The conjunction of these leads to...

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...

In market games the one to one correspondence between commodity types and trading posts would be justified if it were true that the set of equilibria is not affected by the number of trading posts postulated at the ouset of the model. We show that this is not true.

We study the introduction of new products in a vertically differentiated industry. Innovative firms have to engage into reducing time-to-market investments in order to shorten the time interval between innovation and sales. Still, these investments generate irreversible costs which have to be...

This paper tests market co-integration, market leadership and price margins in the context of the recent development of European markets for imported off-season fresh fruit countries in the southern hemisphere. The Engle-Garner and Johansen co-integration tests show that the main European...