It has recently been suggested by several authors that a Cournot-Nash free-trade equilibrium might leave each country worse off than under autarky, in apparent contradiction of earlier findings. In the present note it is shown that the suggestion is typically based on self-contradictory...

It is well known that perfectly competitive free trade is potentially beneficial for all countries if all goods are both rivalrous and excludable in consumption (“private goods”) and recently (2011) the proposition has been modified to accommodate non-rivalrous and non-excludable goods...