Industrial organization is mainly concerned with the behavior of large firms, especially when it comes to oligopoly theory. Experimental industrial organization therefore faces a problem: How can firms be brought into the laboratory? The main approach relies on framing: Call individuals firms!...

Industrial organization is mainly concerned with the behavior of large firms, especially when it comes to oligopoly theory. Experimental industrial organization, therefore, faces a problem: How can firms be brought into the laboratory? The main approach relies on framing: Call individuals...

A Cournot oligopoly in which firms face incomplete information with respect to production capacities is studied. For the case where the firms’ capacities are stochastically independent, the functional form of equilibrium strategies is derived. If inverse demand is concave, a unique symmetric...

We study two electricity markets connected by a fixed amount of crossborder capacity. The total amount of capacity is known to all electricity traders and allocated via an auction. The capacity allocated to each bidder in the auction remains private information. We assume that traders are faced...

This article examines the impact of customer reward programs on the competitive outcome in duopolistic markets. We argue that loyalty discounts for repeat customers constitute a commitment device beneficial to suppliers rather than customers. Analyzing a two-period Bertrand model we show that...

In this paper we analyze R&D collaboration networks in industries where firms are competitors in the product market. Firms' benefits from collaborations arise by sharing knowledge about a cost-reducing technology. By forming collaborations, however, firms also change their own competitive...

I present a game-theoretic model where economic competition and attention competition are interdependent. On the one hand the effort to attract consumer attention depends on the value of attention to the firm which depends on the grade of price competition among all perceived firms. On the other...

One key problem regarding the external validity of laboratory experiments is their duration: while economic interactions out in the field are often lengthy processes, typical lab experiments only last for an hour or two. To address this problem for the case of both symmetric and asymmetric...

We characterize the class of symmetric two-player games in which tit-for-tat cannot be beaten even by very sophisticated opponents in a repeated game. It turns out to be the class of exact potential games. More generally, there is a class of simple imitation rules that includes tit-for-tat but...

We study a strategic market game with finitely many traders, infinite horizon and real assets. To this standard framework (see, e.g. Giraud and Weyers, 2004) we add two key ingredients: First, default is allowed at equilibrium by means of some collateral requirement for financial assets; second,...