Service Hours With Asymmetric Distributions of Ideal Service Time∗

We show that private provision of service hours will be inefficiently low from a social point of view independently of the market structure. We study how asymmetric distributions of ideal service time impact on this market failure. We establish that the time gap between any two opening and closing hours in an oligopoly equilibrium is constant and that this time gap increases if the distribution of ideal service times becomes more uniform. Finally, we establish that longest available service hours are sensitive to price changes but are invariant to changes in the market structure alone.