The aim of this paper is to study the welfare e¤ects of consumer cooperatives in mixed oligopoly markets. We show that under decreasing returns to scale and su¢ ciently high market competition these …rms can contribute more to social welfare when acting on behalf of all consumers rather than...

In many strategic settings comparing the payo¤s obtained by players under full cooperation to those obtainable at a sequential (Stackelberg) equilibrium can be crucial to determine the final outcome of the game. This happens, for instance, in repeated games in which players can break...