This paper investigates how video game publishers’ choice of game release date is affected by the expected level of competition within the game’s product niche. We identify game niches by genre, age-appropriateness, a four week window cohort, publisher and console system. Our analysis is...

Alliances between competitors where an established firm provides access to its marketing and distribution channels are an important real-world phenomenon. We analyze a market where an established firm, firm A, produces a product of well-known quality, and a firm with an unknown brand, firm B,...

There is growing evidence that low-quality customer service prevails in the mobile telecommunications industry. In this paper we provide theoretical support to this empirical observation by using simple game theoretical models where inefficient low-quality service levels are part of an...

In some Bayesian games, payoff-relevant states are influenced by unobserved heterogeneity that also directly affects strategic decisions. When ignored, such endogeneity leads to erroneous parameter inference and policy implications. We introduce a control-function approach for estimating such...

Allowing firms to cooperate in their R&D is an industrial policy, which has received much attention in recent economics literature. Many of these contributions are based on the seminal analysis of d'Aspremont and Jacquemin (1988). We provide a general version of their model, which encompasses...

This paper investigates the structure of bilateral oligopolies - a simple version of Shapley Shubik games with two types of traders and two commodities. It shows that interior equilibria exist, studies the example of CES utility functions to uncover the relation between the complementarity of...

The seminal paper by Salant, Switzer and Reynolds (1983) showed that merger in a standard Cournot framework with linear demand and linear costs is not profitable unless a large majority of the firms are involved in the merger. However, many strategic aspects matter for firm competition such as...

We analyze a market game where firms choose capacities under uncertainty about future market conditions and make output choices after uncertainty has unraveled. We show existence and uniqueness of equilibrium under imperfect competition and establish that capacity choices by strategic firms are...

Electronic coordination links markets at different locations that have initially been (partially) separated by transport costs. Rising competitive pressure should in turn affect incentives to differentiate products. In this paper investment decisions concerning transport cost reduction and...

This study investigates the impact of pre-play communication on the outcomes in Cournot duopoly and triopoly experiments, using both students and managers as subjects. Communication is implemented by two different devices, a 'standardized-communication' and a free-communication device. We find...