For an outsider innovator in a Cournot oligopoly, royalty licensing could be superior to both fixed fee and auction. The result depends on a simple fact that has been overlooked in the existing literature, namely, the number of licenses can take only integer values.  2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: D21; D43; D45

This note shows that oligopolistic loan competition with discriminatory pricing is inefficient when competing banks differ in their ability to screen borrowers: banks with better screening abilities win too small market shares. This result contrasts with a finding by Spence (1976) who showed that an oligopoly with price discrimination achieves first–best efficiency. JEL classification: D43; D82...

Vega-Redondo (1997) showed that imitation leads to the Walrasian outcome in Cournot Oligopoly. We generalize his result to aggregative quasi-submodular games. Examples are the Cournot Oligopoly, Bertrand games with differentiated complementary products, CommonPool Resource games, Rent-Seeking games and generalized Nash-Demand games. JEL-Classifications: C72, D21, D43, L13.

This article analyzes concerns about market power and inequality in a model with multiple sectors, heterogeneous abilities, endogenous labor supply, nonlinear income taxation. Proportional markups no profit dissipation have effect on the economy, policy that reduces nonproportional markup raises (lowers) welfare when it is higher (lower) than weighted average of other markups. With proportional...

This paper studies effects of price floors in a simple model of vertical product differentiation. We find that even non-binding price floors can increase quality on the market, if the cost of quality is sufficiently low. Where a binding price floor does not change the equilibrium quality, it makes consumers worse off. There is also a possibility of overinvestment into quality as a result of the...

We show that there is a unique correlated equilibrium, identical to the unique Nash equilibrium, in the classic Bertrand oligopoly model with homogenous goods and identical marginal costs. This provides a theoretical underpinning for the socalled “Bertrand paradox” as well as its most general formulation to date. Our proof generalizes to asymmetric marginal costs and arbitrarily many players in...

This paper presents synthetically some recent developments in the theory of coalition and network formation. For this purpose, some major equilibrium concepts recently introduced to model the formation of coalition structures and networks among players are brie‡y reviewed and discussed. A few economic applications are also illustrated to give a ‡avour of the type of predictions such models are ...

We address the following issue: what can be said about the degree of competition, in a set of markets with a large number of participants, when no information on the distribution of individual characteristics is available? Our main result is that the proportion of individuals whose strategic behavior differs substantially from price taking, converges to zero as the number of market participants...

A model with two types of consumers, shoppers and captives, is constructed that leads to an equilibrium price dispersion. Shoppers may hold inventories of the good; the level of consumer inventories leads to state-dependent price dispersions. It is shown that prices and quantities display negative serial correlation. The model is tested using grocery store data, which display the predicted corr...

This article studies the design of optimal mechanisms to regulate entry in natural oligopoly markets, assuming the regulator is unable to control the behavior of firms once they are in the market. We adapt the Clarke–Groves mechanism, characterize the optimal mechanism that maximizes the weighted sum of expected social surplus and expected tax revenue, and show that thesemechanisms generally av...