This paper analyzes if vertical foreclosure can emerge as an equilibrium outcome of an infinitely repeated game. Foreclosure is profitable due to a 'raising rival's costs' effect but it is not a Nash equilibrium of the static game. The results are that foreclosure is in fact a subgame perfect...

Our central proposition is that monitoring costs increase with physical distance, and hence, direct investments located further from the foreign investor’s home base should be more likely formed as joint ventures. Tests on a data set of Taiwanese direct investments in Mainland China provide...

Vertical integration followed by quantity competition is studied. The downstream firms simultaneously decide whether to integrate with one of the upstream suppliers. If firms are not able to observe whether the vertically integrated competitor enters the intermediate good market, they are...

In this article, a condition for the optimal division’s number is presented, for a market with two cable operators who offer a network service. First, a reason is presented to justify a partial covering of the national market from the cable operators. Second, a problem of moral hazard is...

Many European countries have faced the erosion of the competitive advantage in the international market with a mixed strategy of productivity increase at home and labour cost reduction abroad, through the international fragmentation of production and subcontracting in low wage countries. Italy...

When more than one component or activity is needed to produce the final product, a firm may use proprietary standards or adopt a common standard to integrate these components. We call these closed and open firms respectively, and develop a model of industry evolution to study the process by...