We build on the imperfection of intellectual property rights as the central motivation for the organization of firms. There are several characteristics specific to a theory of the firm grounded on the absence of intellectual property rights: monetary incentive schemes arise naturally as a...

I analyze n-player games in which players exert effort to win part or all of a prize, whose value can either be exogenously given or itself a function of the efforts of an arbitrary subset of contenders. When the functions mapping the vector of efforts into the part of the prize that each player...

We show in a differential game of a differentiated product doupoly model of price competition with costly production adjustment that when firms are symmetric the leadership attempt by each firm turns into Stackelberg price warfare yielding a (MArkov perfect) steady state outcome more competitive...

This paper revisits a particular behaviour for firms competing in imperfect competitive markets, underlying the well known model of kinked demand curve. We show that under some symmetry and regularity conditions, this asymmetric behaviour of firms sustains monopoly pricing, and possesses...

Until the beginning of 1950s, the economic theory in general, and the microeconomic theory in particular, relied totally on the deterministic character of economic phenomena. Nowadays microeconomic models are built on uncertain elements in a competitive environment that is affected by risk and...

In this paper we review a number of coalitional solution concepts for the analysis of the stability of cartels and mergers under oligopoly. We show that, although so far the industrial organization and the cooperative game-theoretic literature have proceeded somehow independently on this topic,...

This paper examines a multi-player and multi-front Colonel Blotto game in which one player, A, simultaneously competes in two disjoint Colonel Blotto games, against two separate opponents, 1 and 2. Prior to competing in the games, players 1 and 2 have the opportunity to form an alliance to share...

The aim of this paper is to extend Hamilton and Slutsky's (1990) endogenous timing game by including the possibility for players to cooperate. At an initial stage players are assumed to announce both their purpose to play early or late a given duopoly game as well as their intention to cooperate...

We study cartel stability in a differentiated price-setting duopoly with returns to scale. We show that a cartel may be equally stable in the presence of lower differentiation, provided that the decreasing returns parameter is high. In addition we demonstrate that for a given factor of discount,...

This article is about the interpretation of Nash equilibria of one-shot oligopoly games in competition analysis. Such equilibria are often understood as steady-state equilibria of the corresponding game with continuous interaction between the market players. In my view, such interpretations are...