The hypothesis that vertically integrated firms have an incentive to foreclose the input market because foreclosure raises its downstream rivals' costs is the subject of much controversy in the theoretical industrial organization literature. A powerful argument against this hypothesis is that,...

This study investigates the impact of pre-play communication on the outcomes in Cournot duopoly and triopoly experiments, using both students and managers as subjects. Communication is implemented by two different devices, a ‘standardized-communication’ and a free-communication device. We...

We show that for many classes of symmetric two-player games, the simple decision rule "imitate-the-best" can hardly be beaten by any other decision rule. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for imitation to be unbeatable and show that it can only be beaten by much in games that are of...

We introduce a generalized theoretical approach to study imitation models and subject themodels to rigorous experimental testing. In our theoretical analysis we find that the differentpredictions of previous imitation models are due to different informational assumptions, notto different...

Building on the seminal paper of Ordover, Saloner and Salop (1990), I study the role of reputation building on foreclosure in laboratory experiments. In one-shot interactions, upstream firms can choose to build a reputation by revealing their price history to the current upstream competitor. In...

A rapidly growing literature analyzes models in which firms maximize objectives other than profit and enjoy market power. Examples include the labor-managed firm, mixed oligopoly, and delegation models. These models typically retain the aggregative structure of the conventional Cournot model of...

It is a very well-known result that in terms of evolutionary stability the long-run outcome of a Cournot oligopoly market with finitely many firms approaches the perfectly competitive Walrasian market outcome (Vega-Redondo, 1997). However, in this paper we show that an asymmetric structure in...

The Hotelling game of pure location allows interpretations in spatial competition, political theory, and professional forecasting. In this paper, the doubly symmetric mixed-strategy equilibrium for n ≥ 4 firms is characterized as the solution of a well-behaved boundary value problem. The...

In this paper the standard Hotelling model with quadratic transport costs is extended to the multi-firm case. The sequential game consists of a location choice stage and a price setting stage. Considering locational equilibria it is shown that neither holds the Principle of Maximum...

Industries with mixed oligopoly are exceedingly popular all over the world, especially in developing countries, such as China. This paper highlights the innovation strategies of mixed duopoly with a (semi-) public firm and another private firm, and the effects of mixed oligopoly on innovation...