We analyze the strategic protection decision of an innovator between a patent and secrecy in a setting with horizontally differentiated products. By introducing the patenting decision into the well known circular city model, the impact of the disclosure requirement linked to a patent application...

We consider an oligopolistic model with product differentiation in which firm's costs are not given exogenously but are the result of a wage bargaining process between firms and local unions. Using a generalised version of the model of Lopez and Naylor (2004) we compare Cournot and Bertrand...

This paper develops a model of successive oligopolies with endogenous market entry, allowing for varying degrees of product differentiation and entry costs in both markets. Our analysis shows that the downstream conditions dominate the overall profitability of the two-tier structure while the...

We present a theoretical model in tourism economics, assuming that the market for tourism is an oligopoly with differentiated products. Destinations (i.e., countries, regions, sites or even firms) can invest in order to improve their carrying capacity that can be interpreted as the stock of...

In many cases, collusive agreements are formed by asymmetric firms and include only a subset of the firms active in the cartelized industry. This paper endogenizes the process of cartel formation in a numeric simulation model where firms differ in marginal costs and production technologies. The...

The present note shows that "innocuous" Minimum Quality Standards, namely standards that are below the lowest quality level observed in the market, may have effects on equilibrium outcomes. In particular this is true in a duopoly where one high quality firm invests in R&D to lower its cost of...

The literature so far has analyzed the effects of Minimum Quality Standards in oligopoly, using models of pure vertical differentiation, with only two firms, and perfect information. We analyze products that are differentiated horizontally and vertically, with imperfect consumers information,...

In this paper we show that a homogeneous-product market with multiple Bertrand equilibria becomes a market with a single Bertrand equilibrium when we introduce a small degree of product differentiation. When differentiation tends to zero, that Bertrand equilibrium converges to the unique...