Search results for " oligopoly"
showing 10 items of 10 documents
More firms, more competition? The case of the fourth operator in France's mobile phone market
2010
Accepted, Forthcoming; International audience; To foster competition the French government authorized a fourth operator, ‘Free', to enter the country's mobile phone market at the end of 2009 alongside Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom (BT), who held respectively one-half, one-third and one-sixth of the market. By using a stylized model of France's phone market, we have examined what we call the regulator's nightmares and dreams. If Cournot competition is in place before Free's entry, minimizing the total profit fails to maximize the consumer surplus and the total surplus; the maximum most realistic price fall is 6.7% compared to three-way competition and could be 1.7% only; if Orange, SFR an…
Is the French mobile phone cartel really a cartel?
2009
International audience; France Telecom (FT), SFR and Bouygues Telecom (BT) have been fined by France's Conseil de la Concurrence (CC) for organizing a mobile phone cartel with stable market shares (one-half, one-third and one-sixth, respectively) and for directly exchanging commercial information. While not contesting the legal decision, it is argued here that the economic reasoning is flawed. (1) As the CC made much of the firms' stable market shares, we have first followed this line of reasoning by considering that the market shares are quotas under uniform costs. Even if there is a general incentive to form a monopolistic cartel, BT was too small for it to be worth its while to join it; it i…
Evaluation de la concurrence généralisée : un outil matriciel
1993
Input-output matrices and structural analysis are applied to the analysis and forecast of consequences of offensive actions in the case of multiproduct multimarket large firms.
Les followers ont-ils vraiment de l'importance dans le modèle de Stackelberg?
2011
In this paper, we consider a T-stage linear model of Stackelberg oligopoly. First, we show geometrically and analytically that under the two conditions of linear market demand and identical constant marginal costs, the T-stage Stackelberg model reduces to a model where T oligopolies exploit residual demand sequentially. At any stage, leaders behave as if followers did not matter. Second, we study social welfare and convergence toward competitive equilibrium. Especially, we consider the velocity of convergence as the number of firms increases. The convergence is faster when reallocating firms from the most to the less populated cohort until equalizing the size of all cohorts.
The Sylos Postulate reconsidered
2016
This chapter makes a textual comparison between the 1957 2nd Italian edition and the 1962 1st American edition of Oligopoly and Technical Progress, showing that Sylos Labini added to the later edition some fresh sections concerning new firms’ entry and incumbents’ reaction which partially contradict Modigliani’s 1958 presentation of the Sylos Postulate. The theoretical differences between Sylos Labini and Modigliani with regard to the assumption of constant output are traced back to their different modelling strategies on how to tackle the issue of external firms’ conjectures in determining the long-run oligopoly equilibrium price.
Chamberlin, Edward Hastings
2016
The entry describes the life and analytical contributions of the US economist Edward Chamberlin (1899 -1967). It reconstructs the development of Chamberlin's thought on the issue of monopolistic competition and compares it with the Economics of Imperfect Competition by Joan Robinson.
Quality and competition between public and private firms
2017
We study a multistage, quality-then-price game between a public firm and a private firm. The market consists of a set of consumers who have different quality valuations. The public firm aims to maximize social surplus, whereas the private firm maximizes profit. In the first stage, both firms simultaneously choose qualities. In the second stage, both firms simultaneously choose prices. Consumers’ quality valuations are drawn from a general distribution. Each firm's unit production cost is an increasing and convex function of quality. There are multiple equilibria. In some, the public firm chooses a low quality, and the private firm chooses a high quality. In others, the opposite is true. We …
R&D networks among unionized firms
2005
We develop a model of strategic networks in order to analyze how trade unions will affect the stability and efficiency of R&D collaboration networks in an oligopolistic industry with three firms. Whenever firms settle wages, the complete network is always pairwise stable and the partially connected network is stable if and only if spillovers are large enough. If spillovers are small, the complete network is the efficient network; otherwise, the efficient network is the partially connected network. Thus, a conflict between stability and efficiency may occur: efficient networks are pairwise stable, but the reverse is not true. Strong stability even reinforces this conflict. However, once unio…
Leadership in internationalization strategies
2022
This paper examines leadership in internationalization strategies for an asymmetric cost duopoly where firms choose between exports and foreign direct investment (FDI) in a sequential setting. The incentive to lead and to engage in FDI is stronger for the more efficient firm. With sequential choices and the efficient firm playing in advance, it is less likely that firms pick identical internationalization strategies in equilibrium, as compared with simultaneous choices; this is more so for greater cost asymmetry. It also happens for large enough oligopoly profitability when the inefficient firm plays in advance. Follow-the-leader behaviour in FDI arises for low values of the setup cost. Alt…
R&D with spillovers: Monopoly versus noncooperative and cooperative duopoly.
2011
This paper compares industry profit and R&D propensity for a duopoly conducting either noncooperative or cooperative R&D and a monopoly, using two different basic models of strategic R&D. One postulates spillovers in R&D inputs and predicts that equilibrium joint profit and R&D levels are always larger under monopoly. The other postulates spillovers in R&D outputs and sometimes predicts that joint profit and R&D levels are larger under either of the alternative scenarios. In addition, unlike input spillovers, spillovers in R&D outputs sometimes exert a positive effect on both effective and private noncooperative R&D levels.