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...

The Bertrand paradox question is: “Consider a unit-radius circle for which the length of a side of an inscribed equilateral triangle equals 3 . Determine the probability that the length of a ‘random’ chord of a unit-radius circle has length greater than 3 .” Bertrand derived three different ‘correct’ answers, the correctness depending on interpretation of the word, random. Here we employ geomet...

Comparing Cournot and Bertrand Equilibria Revisited by Jim Y. Jin This paper compares Cournot and Bertrand equilibria with mixed products, linear demand and cost functions. It is found that a firm's price (output) need not be higher (lower) in Cournot equilibrium. However, given any number of firms and a mixture of complement and substitute products, every firm's price margin/output ratio is al...

Incentives and Welfare Effect of Sharing Firm-Specific Information by Jim Y. Jin* This paper studies the incentives and the welfare effect of sharing firm-specific information in asymmetric Cournot and Bertrand oligopoly with mixed substitute and complement goods. Revealing firm-specific cost information is the dominant strategy in Cournot oligopoly, while concealing is so in Bertrand oligopoly...

In this article we revisit the classic comparison between Bertrand and Cournot competition in the presence of a cartel of firms that faces outsiders acting individually. This competition setting enables to deal with both non-cooperative and cooperative oligopoly games. We concentrate on industries consisting of symmetrically differentiated products where firms operate at a constant and identica...

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...

Since at least Engle (1982) and Stock and Watson (2002), we know that the conditional variance of future output and inflation evolves over time. However, in these seminal contributions, the risk of real activity and inflation is implicitly considered as symmetric. In this paper, we investigate the time evolution of the conditional distribution of macroeconomics variables with a special interest...

The identical agent, identical good Bertrand game is associated with prices at marginal cost the Bertrand Paradox. If consumers make occasional mistakes I show that the standard Bertrand game gives rise to positive profits and prices above marginal cost. Some firms charge low prices to capture the bulk of the sales while others charge high prices selling to mistaken consumers. Furthermore, with...

The Bertrand-Darboux integrability condition for a certain class of perturbed harmonic oscillators is studied from the viewpoint of the BirkhoffGustavson(BG)-normalization: In solving an inverse problem of the BGnormalization on computer algebra, it is shown that if the perturbed harmonic oscillators with a homogeneous cubic-polynomial potential and with a homogeneous quartic-polynomial potenti...

Achieving software reliability takes many complementary techniques, directed at the process or at the products. This survey summarizes some of the most fruitful ideas. Cite as follows: Bertrand Meyer, Dependable Software, to appear in Dependable Systems: Software, Computing, Networks, eds. Jürg Kohlas, Bertrand Meyer, André Schiper, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, 2006.