Cournot's 1838 model of strategic interaction between competing firms has become the primary workhorse for the analysis of imperfect competition, and shows up in a variety of fields, notably industrial organization and international trade. This entry begins with a tour of the basic Cournot model...

This article uses an infinite-regress model of firm-level decisions to find a rational expectations equilibrium for a duopoly and to relate concepts of conjectural variations and consistency to the Cournot equilibrium. The model derives a conjectural variation instead of assuming it. In...