I show that in any symmetric Nash equilibrium of Hotelling's pure location game, as the number of firms becomes large, the limiting distribution of market shares converges to a Gamma(2,2) distribution. Remarkably, this is true regardless of the distribution of consumers. The proof for the...

This paper shows that Stackelberg has turned the Cournot competitors into monopolists, to result in Bertrand's equilibrium, and to fall into a prisoner's dilemma. This paper then applies Hotelling's theory to break the dilemma

This paper extends the traditional Hotelling's model of spatial competition by allowing firms to choose the degree of general purposeness of their products before they compete in prices. The degree of general purposeness is approximated by endogenizing the per-unit transportation cost...

In a two-firm model where each firm sells a high-quality and a low-quality version of a product, customers differ with respect to their brand preferences and their attitudes towards quality. We show that the standard result of quality-independent markups crucially depends on the assumption that...

This paper sheds light on an empirical controversy about the effect of competition on price discrimination. We introduce individual demand uncertainty into Hotelling’s model of product differentiation and show that firms offer advance purchase discounts. Consumers choose between an early...

This paper sheds light on a recent empirical controversy about the effect of competition on price discrimination in airline markets (Borenstein and Rose (1994), Gerardi and Shapiro, (2009)). We introduce individual demand uncertainty into Hotelling’s model of horizontal product differentiation...

There are examples of entry in two-sided markets, where first entrants occupy a ‘central location’ and serve agents with ‘intermediate tastes,’ while later entrants are niche players. Why would the first entrant choose to become a ‘general’ platform, given that later entrants will...

I find that interconnection might cause the market to be less competitive, and might lead to an increase in the price firms charge for their product. Absent interconnection, firms compete for a consumer for two reasons. The first reason is to obtain revenue from selling the product to a consumer...

We provide a theoretical justification for bi-sourcing, which refers to thesituation where a final goods producer buys an input from an outside supplier and alsoproduces it in-house. Bi-sourcing occurs if the marginal cost of producing the input inhouseis higher than the marginal cost of outside...