Making the weak assumption that the left-hand side of this equation is downward sloping, there will be a unique Y that solves this equation, which depends only on the sum of the marginal costs, not on their distribution across the firms. The observation that output and price in a Cournot industry is independent of the distribution of marginal costs has undoubtably been noted and used several ti...

Biconcavity is a simple condition on inverse demand that corresponds to the ordinary concept of concavity after simultaneous parameterized transformations of price and quantity. The notion is employed here in the framework of the homogeneous-good Cournot model with potentially heterogeneous firms. The analysis leads to unified conditions, respectively, for the existence of a pure-strategy equil...

In a market for a homogeneous good where firms are identical, compete in quantities and produce with constant returns, the percentage of welfare losses (PWL) is small with as few as five competitors for a class of demand functions which includes linear and isoelastic cases. We study markets with positive fixed costs and asymmetric firms. We provide exact formulae of PWL and robust constructions...

In the presence of market power in oligopolistic environment, price discrimination is a natural phenomenon. Surprisingly this setting has not been analyzed in depth in the literature. In contrast with existing literature, e.g., Hazledine (2006) and Kutlu (2009), we consider quantity setting games where …rms compete in two stages. In the …rst stage …rms decide on the choice of capacity and in th...

We study the existence of Cournot equilibria in multimarket oligopolies under the additional restriction that every firm may sell its product only to a limited number of markets simultaneously. This situation naturally arises if market entry is subject to a valid license and each firm holds a fixed number of licenses only, or, equivalently, if the firms’ short-term assets only suffice to serve ...

Market Structure and the Demand for Free Trade ABSTRACT We explore the interplay of market structure and government trade policy in the context of a heterogenous goods duopoly model (allowing for goods to be substitutes or complements) wherein governments simultaneously and noncooperatively choose whether or not to provide subsidies for their firms and then firms noncooperatively choose output ...

We study the welfare implications of two-sided (decentralized) markets involving multiple intermediaries between buyers and sellers. For the analysis, we employ a stylized model where the intermediary sets the quantities of ad slots to purchase and sell, and the prices are a consequence of a Cournot model. The mathematics associated with the model is generic enough that it carries forward to ot...

In a market in which a vertically integrated producer (VIP) supplies an essential input to a retail rival, we explore the role of managerial delegation when it shapes downstream firms’ incentives and determine the endogenous choice of delegation under both Cournot and Bertrand competition. The equilibrium choice of acting as a managerial firm, which is a standard result in literature of strateg...

Consider a Bertrand model in which each rm may be inactive with a known probability, so the number of active rms is uncertain. This activity level can be endogenized in any of several ways{ as whether to incur a xed cost of activity, as output choice, or as quality choice. Our model has a mixed-strategy equilibrium, in which industry pro ts are positive and decline with the number of rms, the s...

Recent experiments suggest that games where actions are strategic substitutes rather than strategic complements exhibit some desirable performance characteristics. This paper reports an experiment conducted to test whether these characteristics extend to differentiated product Cournot and Bertrand markets. We find that Cournot markets do not generally outperform Bertrand markets, and that the o...