Excess capacities held by a dominant firm are usually viewed as ant icompetitive because they constitute a barrier to entry. This paper explores an alternative reason for a dominant firm to hold excess capacities: they serve as an assurance to upstream (or downstream) companies that the dominant...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model of monopolistic competition that has a simple locational interpretation and which allows for multifirm competition. One of the major weaknesses of the standard "circular road" model is the fact that it allows only localized competition. This...