This is a preliminary version of a prospective book which springs from concerted effort among several researchers in the fiels of industrial economics. This chapter is devoted to the strategic role of information in oligopoly, and more broadlyn, in monotone games in general.

This paper investigates the endogenous choice between price- and quantity-setting behaviour in a duopoly game where firms invest in product development first, and then play a marketing game later. Only in the initial R&D stage, the two firms set up a joint venture in order to share the costs of...

A supergame between public and private firms in an oligopolist industry is studied in this paper. We discover that there is a repeated-game equilibrium where the public firm produces less than its one-shot Nash equilibrium quantity, nevertheless the total supply and hence the social welfare are...

This paper explores a pricing algorithm which behaves as a Walrasian auctioneer under the following constraints: [i] traders arrive randomly and each sales/purchase order should be carried out at the currently posted price (sequential service), [ii] the auctioneer need not know the exact...

The effect of merger between competing firms in the same industry is twofold. It increases concentration, which has a negative effect on welfare unless the merger substantially lowers production costs. If products are differentiated, however, there is another effect: before the product is...

Consider an oligopolistic industry where demand uncertainty resolves after at least one firm has engaged in production. Those firms who produce first behave as simultaneous leaders (co-leaders), whilst those who produce after demand becomes observable will be followers. Each follower simply...

This paper shows an endogenous Stackelberg leader-follower relation that stems purely from commitment, not from chronological order of entry. We consider a symmetric duopoly game with a priori demand uncertainty which resolves after a short term. In the beginning, each supplier is allowed to...

This paper shows the possibility that, under certain conditions, it can be socially optimal for the public firm not to privatise its whole production capacity but to retain a part of it, even when private operation of the production facilities is strictly more cost-efficient than public operation.

We characterise the interplay between oligopolistic firms' strategic decisions in product development, and their incentives for (or against) merger. In an R&D intensive industry where newly developed products can be awarded exclusive patent protection, individual firms' profit maximisation can...

We characterize the interplay between firm's decisions in product development, be it joint or independent, and their ensuing repeated price behaviour, either collusive or Bertrand-Nash. We prove that joint-product development and the resulting lack of horizontal differentiation may destabilise...