Review of: Oligopoly Pricing: Old Ideas and New Tools. By Xavier Vives. 2000. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA and London

Contestants have to choose whether to initiate a contest or war, or whether to remain peaceful for another period. We find that agents wait and initiate the contest once their rival is sufficiently weak to be an easy target.

This paper studies a bargaining model of equilibrium price distributions. Consumers choose a seller at random and face s earch costs to switching to another store. In the market equilibrium, the prices at all stores are determined simultaneously as the perfec t equilibrium of a bargaining game....

We study the location equilibrium in Hotelling's model of spatial competition. As d'Aspremont et al. (1979) have shown, with quadratic consumer transportation cost the two sellers will seek to move as far away from each other as possible. This generates a coordination problem which the...

This paper studies the stability of price competition in a horizontally differentiated duopoly. The firms' demand is derived from a distribution of consumer preferences. This description of the consumer sector is applicable to a large class of differentiated commodity markets, including spatial...

This paper extends the revelation principle to environments in which the mechanism designer cannot fully commit to the outcome induced by the mechanism. We show that he may optimally use a direct mechanism under which truthful revelation is an optimal strategy for the agent. In contrast with the...

I present the idea that imperfect information about the (vertical) quality characteristics of goods reduces the sellers' incentives for horizontal product differentiation. As a result, the equilibrium outcome may be characterized by "minimum differentiation." In a spatial framework this implies...