The purpose of this article is to analyze how the presence of a competitive fringe, composed by price taker firms, can affect the sustainability of collusive equilibria. Our starting point is that there exists a diffused misunderstanding about its strategical role as collusive minus factor. We...

We study economic natural selection in classical oligopoly settings. When underlying pure strategies consist of a finite number of prices, convex monotonic dynamics always converge under a weak condition to the smallest price in the support of the initial state that exceeds marginal cost. When...

It is shown that the equilibrium notion of an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) does have predictive power for standard models of Bertrand competition. This is in contrast to a recent claim by Qin and Stuart (1997). The claim is based on the observation that the solution concept ESS behaves...

The operating areas of each terrestrial broadcasting station in Japan are geographically divided by a licensing system and form oligopolies in each of their respective markets. These institutional constraints define the market structure, and as a result, affect the business performance of the...

This paper investigates unionized oligopolistic markets with differentiated products and quality improvement-R&D investments. In endogenous union structures, we investigate the conditions under which firm-level unions may strategically collude, or not, and the impact of their decisions upon the...

This paper studies oligopolistic markets with differentiated products, with endogenous union structures and quality improvement-R&D investments. In the context of a dynamic game-theoretic analysis we investigate the conditions under which firm-level unions may strategically collude, or not, and...

In a union-oligopoly static framework we study the role of unions regarding the possibility and the effects of endogenous cartel formation. Given that firms independently adjust their own quantities, we show that, if union members are not sufficiently risk-averse and...

In a union-oligopoly framework with differentiated products, this paper endogenizes the mode of product market competition by exploring its strategic role on firms� incentives for collusion. It is shown that in a one-shot game setup, provided that union members are...

The present study analyses the dynamics of a nonlinear Cournot duopoly with managerial delegation and bounded rational players. Problems concerning strategic delegation (based on relative performance evaluations) have recently received in depth attention in both the theoretical and empirical...

This paper shows that a cartel that observes neither costs, prices, nor sales may still enforce a collusive agreement by tying each firm's continuation profit to the truncated current profits of the other firms. The mechanism applies to both price and quantity competition, and the main features...