This paper studies imperfect price competition between two intermediaries in an electronic business-to-business matching market with indirect network externalities. The intermediaries differ with regard to their ownership structure: an independent third party incumbent marketplace competes with...

We show that a monopolist final goods producer may find it profitable to create competition by licensing its technology if the input market is imperfectly competitive. With a centralized union, we show that licensing by a monopolist is profitable under both uniform and discriminatory wage...

We analyze the role of consumer expectations in a Hotelling model of price competition when products exhibit network effects. Expectations can be strong (stubborn), weak (price-sensitive) or partially stubborn (a mix of weak and strong). As a rule, the price-sensitivity of demand declines when...

We show that concealing cost information is a dominant strategy in heterogeneous Bertrand oligopolies. This result enables us to endogenize the number of firms in a market in terms of market size, entry costs, and unit cost uncertainty.

This paper shows that obligations from debt hinder tacit collusion if equity owners are protected by limited liability. In contrast to its advantageous commitment value in short-run competition, leverage reduces profits from infinite interaction. Contrasting uncorrelated shocks with a cyclical...

This paper further develops the standard modelling of information exchange between firms in the presence of demand uncertainty which applies to firms in new industries and insecure regions or markets. We replace the normal distribution of the random variables, commonly used because of its...

In this paper we extend the model of vertical product differentiation to also consider information disparities about the extent of quality differences. Equilibrium prices turn out to depend not only on the share of informed consumers but also on uninformed consumers beliefs about quality...

We study a discrete time dynamic game of price competition with spatially differentiated products and price adjustment costs. We characterise the Markov perfect and the open-loop equilibrium of our game. We find that in the steady state Markov perfect equilibrium, given the presence of...

We present a model of imperfect price competition where not all firms can sell to all consumers. A network structure models the local interaction of firms and consumers. We find that aggregate surplus is maximized with a fully connected network, which corresponds to perfect competition, and...

Firms signal high quality through high prices even if the market structure is highly competitive and price competition is severe. In a symmetric Bertrand oligopoly where products may differ only in their quality, production cost is increasing in quality and the quality of each firm’s product...