Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on advertising to build and maintain awareness for their brands in competitive markets. However, awareness formation models in the marketing literature ignore the role of competition. Consequently, we lack both the empirical knowledge and...

In this paper I set forth an antitrust remedy for the oligopolistic pricing problem. Oligopoly pricing resembles a repeated prisoners' dilemma game. Each firm has an incentive to moderately lower its price and thus increase its sales at its competitors' expense. However, each firm knows that its...

We study a supply chain in which a consumer goods manufacturer sells its product through a retailer. The retailer undertakes promotional expenditures, uch as advertising, to increase sales and to compete against other retailer(s). The manufacturer supports the retailer’s promotional...

This paper establishes sufficient conditions for the existence of a stable coalition structure in the "coalition unanimity" game of coalition formation, first defined by Hart and Kurz (1983) and more recently studied by Yi (1997, 2000). Our conditions are defined on the strategic form game used...

Even under antitrust enforcement, firms may still form a cartel in an infinitely-repeated oligopoly model when the discount factor is sufficiently close to one. We present a linear oligopoly model where the profit-maximizing cartel price converges to the competitive equilibrium price as the...

Within this paper an oligopolistic German electricity market is modelled by a game theoretic modelling tool representing a Nash equilibrium. Due to European electricity market liberalisation electricity producing and trading firms react strategically like global market players by joining and...

This paper proposes a formulation of coalitional payoff possibilities in games with externalities, based on the assumption that forming coalitions can exploit a "first mover advantage". We derive a characteristic function and show that when outside players play their best response...

In contrast to the existing literature on repeated games that assumes a Þxed discount factor, I study an environment in which it is more realistic to assume a ßuctuating discount factor. In a repeated oligopoly, as the interest rate changes, so too does the degree to which Þrms discount the...

Even under antitrust enforcement, firms may still form a cartel in an infinitely-repeated oligopoly model when the discount factor is sufficiently close to one. We present a linear oligopoly model where the profit-maximizing cartel price converges to the competitive equilibrium price as the...

We explore the difference between explicit and tacit collusion by investigating the impact communication has in experimental markets. For Bertrand oligopolies with various numbers of firms, we compare pricing behavior with and without the possibility to communicate among firms. We find strong...