This paper studies sequential negotiations of bilateral free-trade agreements in an oligopoly model. The expansion of trading blocs through overlapping trade agreements allows the option of hub-and-spoke systems and achieves multilateral free trade as the equilibrium path, even if the expansion...

To analyze the effects of simultaneous tariff reductions by multiple importing countries on prices, we construct a simple three-country model where a good is produced by a monopolist with nonconstant marginal cost and imported by two countries. We compare two representative tariff-reduction...