We show that for many classes of symmetric two-player games, the simple decision rule "imitate-the-best" can hardly be beaten by any other decision rule. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for imitation to be unbeatable and show that it can only be beaten by much in games that are of...

How does market organization affect quality innovation efforts and social welfare? Three stochastic dynamic market structures considered are monopoly, duopoly, and social planning. Products can be either linearly or nonlinearly substitutable. The introduction of a step function allows richer...

In many markets, empirical evidence suggests that positive production cost shocks are transmitted more quickly and fully to final prices than negative ones. This article explains asymmetric price adjustment caused by firms imperfectly colluding on supra-competitive price levels. While positive...

The paper presents a game-theoretic model in order to investigate to what extent an employee privatization program of a State owned firm can be feasible under certain assumptions concerning the players' objective functions and the market structure in which the firm operates. The public managers...

The bulk of the global innovative effort takes place in 5 countries: USA, Japan and China as leaders, with France and United Kingdom as immediate followers, which all display, on the long run, a negative marginal value added on innovation. The present paper attempts to answer the following...

A reaction curve RC, also called reaction function or best-reply function, is the locus of optimal, i.e. profit-maximizing, actions that a firm may undertake for any given action chosen by a rival firm. The RC diagram is the standard tool for the graphical analysis of duopoly. In the diagram the...

The result that firms competing in a Cournot oligopoly with pairwise collaboration form a complete network under zero or negligible link formation costs provided by Goyal and Joshi (2003) no longer hold in multi-market oligopolies. Link formation in one market affects a firm’s profitability...

We consider consumers with the same reservation price, who desire to buy at most one unit of a good. Firms compete only in prices but there are other features firms cannot control that would eventually lead an agent to buy in one firm or another. We introduce such uncertainty in a model of a...

Entry of new firms can be difficult or even impossible at capacity constrained facilities, despite the actual cost of entering is low. Using a game theoretic model of incumbent firms’ pricing behaviour under these conditions, it is found that under the assumption of Bertrand competition and...

In recent years there has been an increasing diffusion of open source projects, as well as an increasing interest among scholars on the topic. Open source software (OSS) is developed by communities of programmers and users, usually sponsored by private firms; OSS is available in the public...