We consider the issue of endogenous timing, according to the extended game of Hamilton-Sluytsky (1990), for the classical Coumot and Bertrand duopolies. We provide minimal sufficient conditions, directly on the primitives of each model (i.e. the demand and cost functions), yielding the...

We provide an extensive and general investigation of the effecst on industry performance - profits, social welfare and price-cost margins - of exogenously changing the number of firms in Cournot markets. This includes an in-depth exploration of the well-known trade-off between competition and...

In the framework of symmetric Cournot oligopoly, this paper provides two minimal sets of assumptions on the demand and cost functions that imply respectively that, as the number of firms increases, the minimal and maximal equilibria lead to (i) decreasing industry price and increasing or...

Studies of second-b est environmental regulation ofiden tical polluting agents have invariably ignored potentially welfare-improving asymmetric regulation by imposing equal regulatory treatment of identical firms at the outset. Yet, cost asymmetry between oligopoly firms may well give rise to...

We prove that the coefficient of absolute prudence is greater than k - times coefficient of absolute risk aversion for the utility function if and only if the coefficient of absolute prudence is (3-k) times the coefficient of absolute risk aversion for the inverse utility function. Moreover this...

In view of the uncertainty over the ability of merging firms to achieve efficiency gains, we model the post-merger situation as a Cournot oligopoly wherein the outsiders face uncertainty about the merged entity's final cost. At the Bayesian equilibrium, a bilateral merger is profitable provided...

This paper investigates the pass-through of an excise tax imposed on a monopoly firm with constant marginal cost. The optimal price increases as tax increases for any demand function. Tax pass-through is globally under or in excess of 100% according as the direct demand function is log-concave...

The literature on supermodular optimization and games is surveyed from the perspective of potential users in economics. This methodology provides a new approach for comparative statics based only on critical assumptions, and allows a general analysis of games with strategic complementarities....

We consider a two-period duopoly characterized by a one-way spillover structure in process R&D and a very broad specification of product market competition. We show that a priori identical firms always engage in different levels of R&D, at equilibrium, thus giving rise to an innovator/imitator...

In the standard two-stage framework of R&D/product market competition, this paper provides a performance comparison between monopoly and the cartelized research joint venture, using two well-known models based on different versions of the R&D spillover process. According to the model with a...