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 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.