Oligopoly models where prior actions by firms affect subsequent marginal costs have been useful in illuminating policy debates in areas such as antitrust regulation, environmental protection, and international competition. The authors discuss properties of such models when a Cournot equilibrium...

We derive several comparative-static results for Cournot games when firms have nonconstant marginal-cost curves which shift exogenously. The results permit us to rank certain vectors of equilibrium marginal costs with the same component sum according to their associated social surplus or...