When selling their products domestically or internationally firms rely on more than just price as a strategic variable. Any trade policy that affects or limits the use of one variable will likely have strategic consequences for the use of all the others. Using a Hotelling model with vertical...

We develop a model of vertical innovation in which firms incur a market entry cost and position themselves in the quality space. Once established, firms compete monopolistically in the quality space, selling to consumers with heterogeneous tastes for quality. Exogenously growing productivities...

The note analyzes a slightly modified Hotelling model in which two firms, by paying costs, are allowed to choose multiple store locations. We characterize the condition under which agglomeration occurs, and show that the principle of minimum differentiation never holds when the set up cost of...

We uniquely examine the relationship between firm-sponsored training and product quality competition. Using an oligopolistic model of both price and quality competition, we show that an increase in the sensitivity of demand to product quality will strengthen firms’ incentives to train their...

We extend the analysis carried out by Valletti (2000) by considering an environmental externality in a vertically differentiated duopoly where firms compete à la Cournot with fixed costs of quality improvement. We show that, if the weight of the external effect is high enough, the resulting...