We model capacity-building investments in a homogeneous product duopoly facing uncertain demand growth. Capacity building is achieved through the addition of production units that are durable and lumpy and whose cost is irreversible. While building their capacity over time, firms compete à la...

The general interest would require that the use of major equipments be priced at their marginal cost, including all opportunity costs such as congestion and pollution costs. At least, prices should be lowered until full utilization of these equipments is obtained. This is a result that...

In this document, we present the notion of a cost game, defined as a cooperative game where the gain from cooperation is the cost reduction obtained when the projects of a set of agents are realized in a coordinated way. The problem is then to decide how this gain will be shared among agents or...

In this paper, we present the main solution concepts for cooperative games, which have been used in the context of cost games. We put a special emphasis on the concept of core. We also present the concepts of semicore, von Neumann-Morgenstern stable set, nucleolus and Shapley value. However, we...

Large cities have underground networks of pipes and/or wires for water, sewage, natural gas, electricity and telecommunication services. These networks carry heavy fixed costs that must be shared among users. This problem has specific characteristics that we illustrate with an example. After...

La plupart des organisations, sinon toutes, répartissent d'une manière ou d'une autre des coûts communs entre leurs diverses composantes ou encore entre leurs différents partenaires. Ces problèmes de partage de coûts communs se posent avec de plus en plus d'acuité car les règles de...

We study the interactions between the capital structure and the technological flexibility choices of firms in a duopoly. When there are bankruptcy costs, a leveraged firm may modify its strategic choices in order to decrease its probability of bankruptcy. We show that, when the capacity level of...

We show that whether observing technological choices made by competitors is possible or not has significant impacts on the equilibrium technological configurations. Depending upon the industry characteristics, the strategic value of technological flexibility may be either positive or negative,...

There is a large literature on the optimal order of exploitation of natural resources. We explore the impact of specific technical progress that enables the saving of resource inputs in production on the order of exploitation. Models of growth tend to assume uniform and global technical progess....

We study the optimal policies of research and development in the context of a resource-exploiting economy. We distinguish two cases: non-renewable resources and renewable resources. In the first case, we show that it is useful to construct an index of scarcity, which is the product of the level...