This paper builds an evolutionary model of an industry where firms produce differentiated products. Firms have different average cost functions and different demand functions. Firms are assumed to be totally irrational in the sense that firms enter the industry regardless of the existence of...

This paper models a generalized form of monopolistic competition such that consumers are differentiated horizontally by taste while firms are differentiated vertically by quality location. Consumers have quadratic transportation costs of disutility from consuming a non-ideal brand, and firms are...

Here we reproduce the table of contents and the introductory chapter to our book of related essays published by Edward Elgar. These essays deal with the important implications of allowing for the distribution of goods in characteristic space and of producers in geographic space. Although several...

This paper analyzes the behavior of prices and finished-goods inventories in a model of monopolistic competition, where the motivation for holding inventories is the prospect of lost sales. An eventual goal of the present investigation is the development of an empirical framework, based on a...

We show that incomplete cartels in quantity-setting oligopolies may increase welfare, without any efficiencies or synergies being internalized by cartel formation. The main intuition is that the cartel has an incentive to contract output and that the firms outside the cartel react to this by...

This paper studies the behavior of competing firms in a duopoly with rational inattentive consumers. Firms play a sequential game in which they decide to obfuscate their individual prices before competing on price. Probabilistic demand functions are endogenously determined by the consumers'...

This paper studies the behavior of competing firms in a duopoly with rational inattentive consumers. Firms play a sequential game in which they decide to obfuscate their individual prices before competing on price. Probabilistic demand functions are endogenously determined by the consumers'...

Two homogeneous-good firms compete for a consumer’s unitary demand. The consumer is rationally inattentive and pays entropy-based information processing costs to learn about the firms’ offers. While trade is always inefficient if firms collude, we obtain efficiency under competition for a...