In this paper we address the following question : is it more profitable, for an entrant in a differentiated market, to acquire an existing firm than to compete ? We illustrate the answer by considering competition in the banking sector

This paper faces two questions concerning Joint Ventures (JV) agreements. First, we study how the partners contribution affect the creation and the profit sharing of a JV when partners’ effort is not obervable. Then, we see whether such agreements are easier to enforce when the decision on JV...

This paper examines a three-stage model of divisionalization wher, first, two parents firms create independent unts, second, the parents firms allocate cost reducing levels over these units, and third, the resulting uits compete in a Cournot mrket given their current costs of production. The...

We consider a game in which firms' owners assign to their managers a delegation scheme weighting profits and market shares. Managers then compete in quantities. We show first that this delegation scheme typically leads to quantities being strategic substitutes or complements depending on firms'...

This paper argues that the balance of power between producers and retailers depends on the relative degrees of differentiation at the two levels of the vertical structure. We propose an extension of Hotelling's model in which two producers, competing in prices with horizontally differentiated...

This paper analyses successive markets where the intra-market linkage depends on the technology used to produce the final output. We investigate entry of new firms, when entry obtains by expanding the economy as well as collusive agreements between firms. We highlight the differentiated effects...

In non-union models, there is an ambiguous relationship between collusion on the product market and the resulting impact on the labour market. We can derive some conclusions by assuming a dual labour market with qualified and unqualified workers taking into account the efficiency effect when...

We analyze a model of a vertically differentiated duopoly with two regions. These two locations differ for the market size or for the distribution of the willingness to pay for quality of their consumers. Firms sequentially choose to settle in one region and then simultaneously compete in...

Recent human capital theories predict that labor market frictions and product market competition influence firm-sponsored training. Using matched worker-firm data from Dutch manufacturing, our paper empirically assesses the validity of these predictions. We find that a decrease in labor market...