In a world where firms are oligopolists, is it possible to create a customs union that raises the welfare of member countries without hurting non-members countries? We give sufficient conditions for an affirmative answer.

This paper examines the stability of research joint venture when the success of innovative activities is uncertain. While an increase in the likelihood of making a discovery provides firms with an incentive to cooperate, there is a competing incentive to conduct R&D independently. Should the RJV...

A model of location choice by Cournot oligopolists is presented, under the assumption that R&D spillovers depend on the distance between firms. We show that a variety of patters emerge. Agglomeration is optimal under certain assumptions. Geographical dispersion in a two- dimensional plane is...

We analyze a model of lobbying by oligopolists who allocate entrepreneurial time between lobbying and internal control (monitoring). We seek answers to the following questions: (i) if firms differ woth recpect to comparative advantage in lobbying, what is the equilibrium allocation of time...

This paper studies the optimal production subsidies for domestic firms that compete in an export market against each other as well as against foreign rivals. Assuming that all firms do not have identical cost curves, it shows that the optimal policy for the home government is to give the more...

We show that under Bertrand competition, firms may have an incentive to transfer real ressources to a joint venture operating in an unrelated market. The optimal transfers are typically asymmetric, in order to reduce the extent of rivalry in the oligopoly.

This paper shows that if domestic firms do not have identical unit costs, then the interplay between the Herfindahl index of concentration and the elasticity of the slope of the demand curve is of major importance in the determination of optimal trade policies. When the demand curve is concave,...

This paper analyzes a class of two-stage Cournot games where firms are collusive in the first stage, and shows that oligopolists may have a strong incentive to redistribute resources (such as capital, pollution permits etc...) within the industry as a means of coordinating their output decision....

This paper considers a model of oligopolistic competition and locational choice that incorporates the notion of regional industrial systems. Firms play a non cooperative game where the strategy set of firms is given by a set of existing industrial districts. Each firm is distinguished by its...

This paper analyzes the problem of altering the cost structure within an oligopoly, in the presence of costs of manipulation. Oligopolistic firms (which differ from each other in production costs) compete a la Cournot in the second stage, taking as given firm-specific taxees or input prices. In...