We characterize the interplay between firms’ decision in terms of product standardization and the nature of their ensuing market behaviour. We prove the existence of a non-monotone relationship between firms’ decision at the product stage and their intertemporal preferences.

We provide an extensive and general investigation of the effects on industry performance (profits and social welfare) of exogenously changing the number of firms in a Cournot framework. This amounts to an in-depth exploration of the well-known trade-off between competition and production...

Kreps and Scheinkman´s (1983) celebrated result is that in a two-stage model of a market with homogeneous products in which firms noncooperatively pick capacities in the first stage and set prices in the second stage, the equilibrium outcome is that of a one-shot Cournot game. This note derives...

We investigate the choice of market variable, price or quantity, of an optimal implicit cartel. If the discount factor is high, the cartel can realize the monopoly profit in both cases. Otherwise, it is optimal for the cartel to rely on quantities in the collusive phase if goods are substitutes...

We survey some of the literature on the effects of improved market transparency on competition in oligopoly. Generally, improved transparency from the perspective of firms makes detection of deviations from tacitly collusive agreements easier, thus facilitating oligopolistic coordination. On the...

Antitrust practitioners and consumers protectionists often argue that market transparency should be improved to allow consumers to shop around for bargain prices thereby putting pressure on oligopolists´ pricing. We model how transparency, interpreted as the comparability from the point of view...

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...

Advance production serves as a means of quantity commitment. Therefore, a quantity-competing firm may have an incentive to invest in advance production in order to pre-empt its opponent(s), even when [i] it is technologically more costly than on-spot production, and [ii] it does not entitle the...

We examine the effects of restructuring electricity markets on capacity investments, retail prices and welfare when demand is uncertain. We study the following market configurations: (i) integrated monopoly, (ii) integrated duopoly with wholesale trade, and (iii) separated duopoly with wholesale...

This note relates to Topkis (1995). We establish via counterexample that:(i) A new monotone transformation of the firms' profit functions may lead to cardinal complementarity when the standard log and identity transformations both fail, and (ii) Topkis's notion of critical sufficient condition...