This paper examines retail competition in a liberalized gas market. Vertically integrated firms run both wholesale activities (buying gas from the producers under take-or-pay obligations) and retail activities (selling gas to final customers). The market is decentralized and the firms decide...

This paper examines competition in the liberalized natural gas market. Each .firm has zero marginal cost core capacity, due to long term contracts with take or pay obligations, and additional capacity at higher marginal costs. The market is decentralized and the firms decide which customers to...

Motivated by policy events experienced during the last two decades by the European natural gas industry, this paper develops a simple model for analyzing the interaction between gas release and capacity investment programs as tools to improve the performance of imperfectly competitive markets....

EU has to attain the strategic objectives for 2020: 20% of energy from renewable sources, cutting the emissions of greenhouse gases by 20% and diminishing the dependence on imported fuels, that is why in the last years European Commission has decided that MS should increase the flexibility of...

This paper examines retail competition in a liberalized gas market. Vertically integrated firms run both wholesale activities (buying gas from the producers under take-or-pay obligations) and retail activities (selling gas to final customers). The market is decentralized and the firms decide...

The paper investigates a two-stage competition in a vertical di¤erentiated industry, where each …firm produces an rbitrary number of similar qualities and sells them to heterogeneous consumers. We show that, when unit costs of quality are increasing and quadratic, each …firm has an incentive...

We present a Hotelling model of price and advertising competition between prescription drugs that differ in quality/side e¤ects. Advertising results in the endogenous formation of two consumer groups: brand loyal and non-brand loyal ones. We show that advertising strategies are strategic...

We present a Hotelling model of price and advertising competition between prescription drugs that differ in quality/side effects. Promotional effort results in the endogenous formation of two consumer groups: brand loyal and non-brand loyal ones. We show that advertising intensities are...

This paper studies the effects of generic entry on post-patent price competition for 18 prescription drugs recently exposed to competition. An independent, validating test of the “generic competition paradox” is conducted using a newly created data set. Each generic entrant is associated...

This paper focuses on the pricing behavior of Japanese and United States firms selling their identical products in New York City, Chicago, Osaka, and Tokyo. The authors utilize some simple models of international price dispersion and market segmentation that generate predictions about testable...