It is difficult to eliminate all market power in electricity markets and it is therefore frequently suggested that some market power should be tolerated: extra revenues contribute to fixed cost recovery, facilitate investment, and increase security of supply. This suggestion implicitly assumes all generation technologies benefit equally from market power. We assess a mixture of conventional and...

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 upstream conditions mainly affect the distribution of profits. We compare the welfare effects of upstre...

Price dispersion is ubiquitous in settings that closely approximate textbook Bertrand competition. We show (Propositions 1 and 2) that only a little bounded rationality among sellers is needed to rationalize such dispersion. A variety of statistical tests, based on data sets from two independent laboratory experiments and structural estimates of the parameters of our models, suggest that bounde...

A stable market structure is a partition of the firms in an industry such that there is no incentive for any breakups or mergers. Characterizing such stability requires an endogenization of both the core and Cournot equilibrium as well as all hybrid equilibria. This paper solves for the stable partitions in a general oligopoly by providing a tractable condition: a partition is stable if and onl...

Introductory Offers in a Model of Strategic Competition* We show how introductory offers emerge endogenously under conditions of competition in markets with switching costs. In a standard Hotelling model we find the combination of switching costs and introductory discounts to reduce industry profits relative to industries without switching costs, in which introductory offers do not emerge. Thus...

In this paper, collusive price leadership in homogeneous good capacity-constrained repeated price competition is examined. In the stage game, firms choose their timing of price setting. Although setting a price early is disadvantageous per se, a large firm has an incentive to move early in order to demonstrate its commitment not to deviate. If the discount factor is not too large, this behavior...

This paper develops a contest model of a professional sports league in which clubs maximize a weighted sum of profits and wins (utility maximization). The model analyzes how more win-orientated behavior of certain clubs affects talent investments, competitive balance and club profits. Moreover, in contrast to traditional models, we show that revenue sharing does not always reduce investment inc...

In this note we show that the results developed in Singh and Vives (1984) are sensitive to the duopoly assumption (Rand Journal of Economics 15, 546-554). If there are more than two firms, prices may be higher under price competition than under quantity competition. This will be the case if quality differences are large and goods are complements. If goods are substitutes, high-quality firms may...

This paper revisits the licensing of a non–drastic process innovation by an outside innovator to a Cournot oligopoly. We propose a new mechanism that combines a restrictive license auction with royalty licensing. This mechanism is more profitable than standard license auctions, auctioning royalty contracts, fixed–fee licensing, pure royalty licensing, and two-part tariffs. The key features are ...

This paper studies the entry decision of a multinational enterprise into a foreign market. Two alternative entry modes for a foreign direct investment are considered: Greenfield investment versus acquisition. In contrast to existing approaches, the acquisition price and the profits under both entry modes are endogenously determined. Interestingly, we find that the optimal entry mode decision is...