The paper unveils the market structure of container shipping, which suffers by many interpretations. Existing models regress between contestability, duopoly, monopolistic competition and game theory. This paper proposes an oligopoly model with two groups of companies: oligopolists and...

The U.S. and EU Merger Guidelines strongly emphasize the relevance of the "ease of entry" argument in merger evaluations. Up to now, very little is known empirically about how mergers affect entry and exit, and the resulting number of firms in the markets. We empirically test this aspect of...

This paper considers the problem of standard-creating coalition formation in an oligopoly. Cooperative R&D investments with the aim to improve product quality are explicitly taken into account. We obtain the following results. If both the strength of network effects and the degree of product...

We argue that, in a simple setting, the relation between the intensity of competition and cost-reducing investment is U-shaped. We consider a two-stage game with cost-reducing investments followed by a linear differentiated Cournot duopoly. We first show that, except for firms that are much less...

We study the gains from trade in a model with oligopolistic competition, heterogeneous firms and innovation, and provide a formula to decompose the mechanism. The new insight we provide is that market concentration can be a welfare-relevant feature of market power above and beyond markup...

In the spirit of Arrow (1962), we examine, in an oligopoly model with horizontally differentiated products, how much a firm is willing to pay or a process innovation that it would be the only one to use. We show that different measures of competition (number of firms, degree of product...

I study the joint determination of market structure and growth in an oligopolistic economy. Firms run in-house R&D programs to produce over time a continuous flow of cost-reducing (incremental) innovations. In symmetric equilibrium, the dispersion of resources across firms prevents the...

This paper investigates dynamic process innovation in a product differentiated market where firms can reinvest present profits to reduce future costs. The focus is set on the market performance when the number of competing firms is determined by a social planner. The main contribution consists...

This paper evaluates how different lengths of entry regulation impact market structure and market performance using a dynamic structural model. We formulate an oligopoly model in the tradition of Ericson and Pakes (1995) and allow entry costs to vary over time. Firms have the opportunity to...