The authors characterize the interplay between firms' decisions in terms of either horizontal or vertical product differentiation and their ensuing price behavior, be that collusive or not. They prove the existence of a non-monotone relationship between firms' decisions at the development stage...

In a strategic environment, when a player's information acquisition is observable to others, it may strictly decrease the player's resulting equilibrium payoff even if information acquisition itself is costless. This phenomenon has previously been known by a number of examples. This paper shows...

While many preceding studies on R&D discuss the equilibrium amount and speed of the R&D investment, this paper focuses on its equilibrium direction. Under a broad class of parametric conditions, there is a pure-strategy equilibrium in which multiple firms "cluster", i.e. search for the same...

We develop a model to show that cartels that produce goods with lower durability are easier to sustain implicitly. This observation gen- erates the following results: 1) implicit cartels have an incentive to pro- duce goods with an inefficiently low level of durability; 2) a monopoly or explicit...