This paper investigates the endogenous choice of the strategic variable, price or quantity, taken in a mixed duopoly by a public and a private firm prior to market competition. While Matsumura and Ogawa (2012) in a standard mixed duopoly find that price is the unique equilibrium, we show that,...

We consider the choice of price/quantity by a public and a private firm in a mixed differentiated duopoly. First, we study the way in which the strategic choice of the market variable is affected by different given organizational structures (managerial or entrepreneurial) of the public and the...

The May 2009 Rose Garden ceremony for President Obama’s signing of new fuel efficiency mandates for automobiles was attended by a remarkable gathering of “bootleggers and Baptists” - “Baptist” environmentalists who were pleased to get a policy they desired, and “bootlegger”...

Critics of privatization argue that privatization encourages providers to lobby for industry expansion. I argue that this is not generally true when public-sector actors also lobby. Where the effectiveness of advocacy depends on total expenditures, some initial amount of privatization always...

A common argument against privatization is that private providers will self-interestedly lobby to increase the size of their market. In this Article, I evaluate this argument, using, as a case study, the argument against prison privatization based on the possibility that the private prison...

A supergame between public and private firms in an oligopolist industry is studied in this paper. We discover that there is a repeated-game equilibrium where the public firm produces less than its one-shot Nash equilibrium quantity, nevertheless the total supply and hence the social welfare are...

We show that the entry of private profit-maximising firms makes the consumers worse off compared to having a nationalised monopoly. Such entry increases the nationalised firm’s profit, industry profit, and social welfare, at the expense of the consumers. Our result is important for competition...

We investigate the possibility of using public firms to regulate polluting emissions in a Cournot oligopoly where production takes place at constant returns to scale and entails a negative environmental externality. We model the problem as a differential game and investigate (i) the Cournot-Nash...

We examine both quantity and price competition in a mixed oligopoly. In a market in which the adoption of commitment strategies enables the public firm or a government to achieve welfare gains, profits of both the public and the private firms turn out to be higher under Cournot than Bertrand...