This paper investigates the determinants of the structure of the banking industry by fitting a monopolistic competition model to a sample of banks drawn from eight EEC countries over 1989-1993. In the theoretical model, banks decide strategically both entry and the branching size of thier...

We study the development of an industry-evolution of capacity, production and prices- in a continuous-time real-options model under various assumptions on competition. Investment takes the form of sequential acquisition of indivisible units of capacity. As benchmarks, we determine the optimal...

This paper analyzes environmental labeling strategies in a duopoly market. We consider a three-stage game where firms successively choose their production technology, label signal and price. The willingness to pay for the environmental quality is explained by an altruistic parameter as consumers...

We analyze the strategic pricing and informative advertising decisions made by firms in duopolistic contexts. We show that whether the products are substitutes or complements, these exist strategic settings in which firms keep potential consumers uninformed about their products even if...

It is shown that a fixed cost of nominal price changes enhances the ability of firms to collude in an ologopolistic market for a homogeneous good. Nevertheless, harsh price competition with firms making no profit remains a possible outcome. The analysis focuses on stable symmetric steady states...

We study in this paper how the technological flexibility choices and equilibrium configurations depend first on the industry characteristics (demand function and cost parameters specific to the multiproduct flexible technology and to the product dedicated technologies) and, second, on the...

We show that whether observing technological choices made by the competitors is possible or not has significant impact on the equilibrium technological configurations. Depending upon the industry characteristics, the strategic value of technological flexibility may be either positive or...

Bertrand argued that price would be driven down to marginal cost even with only two firms in the market. Chamberlin, by introducing product differentiation, argued that price will exceed marginal cost even when there are many firms. Thus product differentiation resolves the "Bertrand Paradox"....