In this paper we study the problem of price competition and free entry in congested markets. In particular, we consider a network with multiple origins and a common destination node, where each link is owned by a firm that sets prices in order to maximize profits, whereas users want to minimize...

A buyer procures a network to span a given set of nodes; each seller bids to supply certain edges, then the buyer purchases a minimal cost spanning tree. An efficient tree is constructed in any equilibrium of the Bertrand game.

We study a mechanism design problem in which players can take part in a mechanism to coordinate their actions in a default game. By refusing to participate in the mechanism, a player can revert to playing the default game non-cooperatively. We show with an example that some allocation rules are...

Buyer cooperatives, buyer alliances, and horizontal mergers are often perceived as attempts to increase buyer power. In contrast to prior research emphasizing group size, I show that even small buyer groups composed of buyers with heterogeneous preferences can increase price competition among...

We introduce a criterion for robustness to strategic uncertainty in games with continuum strategy sets. We model a player's uncertainty about another player's strategy as an atomless probability distribution over that player's strategy set. We call a strategy profile robust to strategic...

We show that for many classes of symmetric two-player games, the simple decision rule “imitate-if-better” can hardly be beaten by any strategy. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for imitation to be unbeatable in the sense that there is no strategy that can exploit imitation as a...

An experiment is designed to provide a snapshot of the strategies used by players in a repeated price competition game with a random continuation rule. One hundred pairs of subjects played the game over the Internet, with subjects having a few days to make their decisions in each round....

A longstanding criticism of the core is that it is too sensitive to small changes in player numbers, as in a well known example where one extra seller (resp. buyer) causes the entire surplus to go to the buyer's (seller's) side. We test this example in the lab, using several different trading...

We consider a dynamic competition game involving three players, in which each player can vary the extent of his competition on a per-rival basis. We call such competition targeted. We show that if the players are myopic, then the weaker players eventually lose the game to their strongest rival....

We propose a model of price competition where consumers exogenously differ in the number of prices they compare. Our model can be interpreted either as a non-sequential search model or as a network model of price competition. We show that (i) if consumers who previously just sampled one firm...