Search results for "D43"
showing 10 items of 13 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…
Mobile telephony in emerging markets: The importance of dual-SIM phones
2020
Abstract A substantial share of customers in emerging markets use dual-SIM phones and subscribe to two mobile networks. A primary motive for so called multi-simming is to take advantage of cheap on-net services from both networks. In our modelling effort, we augment the seminal model of competing telephone networks á la Laffont, Rey and Tirole (1998b) by a segment of flexible price hunters that may choose to multi-sim. According to our findings, in equilibrium, the networks set a high off-net price in the linear tariffs to achieve segmentation. This induces the price hunters to multi-sim. We show that increased deployment of dual-SIM phones may induce a mixing equilibrium with high expected…
Multiproduct trading with a common agent under complete information: Existence and characterization of Nash equilibrium
2014
This paper focuses on oligopolistic markets in which indivisible goods are sold by multiproduct firms to a continuum of homogeneous buyers, with measure normalized to one, who have preferences over bundles of products. Our analysis contributes to the literature on private, delegated agency games with complete information, extending the insights by Chiesa and Denicolò (2009) to multiproduct markets with indivisibilities and where the agent's preferences need not be monotone. By analyzing a kind of extended contract schedules -mixed bundling prices- that discriminate on exclusivity, the paper shows that efficient equilibria always exist in such settings. There may also exist inefficient equil…
Multi-product firms and product variety
2008
The goal of this paper is to study the role of multi-product firms in the market provision of product variety. The analysis is conducted using the spokes model of non-localized competition proposed by Chen and Riordan (2007). Firstly, we show that multi-product firms are at a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis single-product firms and can only emerge if economies of scope are sufficiently strong. Secondly, under duopoly product variety may be higher or lower with respect to both the first best and the monopolistically competitive equilibrium. However, within a relevant range of parameter values duopolists drastically restrict their product range in order to relax price competition, and as a…
Technical and health governance aspects of the External Quality Assessment Scheme for the SARS-CoV-2 molecular tests: institutional experience perfor…
2022
Abstract Objectives Since December 2019, the worldwide public health has been threatened by a severe acute respiratory syndrome caused by Coronavirus-2. From the beginning, a turning point has been the identification of new cases of infection, in order to minimize the virus spreading among the population. For this reason, it was necessary introducing a panel of tests able to identify positive cases, which became crucial for all countries. Methods As a Regional Reference Centre, the CRQ Laboratory (Regional Laboratory for the Quality Control) developed and conducted an External Quality Assessment (EQA) panel of assay, so as to evaluate the quality of real-time reverse transcription polymeras…
Cross-country comparisons of competition and pricing power in European banking
2009
Abstract Studies of banking competition and competitive behavior both within and across countries typically utilise only one of the few measures that are available. In trying to assess the relative competitive position of banking markets in 14 European countries, existing indicators of competition are found to give conflicting predictions across countries, within countries, and over time. This is because indicators of competition tend to measure different things and are additionally influenced by cross-country differences in cost efficiency, fee income levels, real economic growth and inflation. We attempt to separate bank pricing power from these embodied influences and derive more consist…
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…
Endogenous R&D Symmetry in Linear Duopoly with One-way Spillovers
2005
A duopoly model of cost reducing R&D-Cournot market competition is extended to encompass endogenous timing of R&D investments. Under the assumption that R&D spillovers are zero under simultaneous choices of R&D and only flow from the R&D leader to the follower under sequential choices, sequential and simultaneous play at the R&D stage are compared in order to assess the role of technological externalities in stimulating or attenuating endogenous firm asymmetry. The only timing structure of the R&D stage sustainable as subgame–perfect Nash equilibrium involves simultaneous play and thus zero spillovers.
R&D, Competition and Growth with Human Capital Accumulation Revisited
2012
In this paper, we have presented a generalization of Bucci's (2003) model in which have disentangled the monopolistic mark-up in the intermediate goods sector, the intermediate goods share in the final output and the returns to specialization in order to have a better measurement of competition. Indeed, unlike Bucci (2003), in our model, the measure of competition is completely independent of the intermediate goods share in the final output and the returns to specialization. Our main finding is that, unlike Bucci (2003), we show that the competition does not play any role in growth. This result is explained by the complementarity of innovation and human capital assumed in the research produ…
NASH EQUILIBRIA IN A MODEL OF MULTIPRODUCT PRICE COMPETITION: AN ASSIGNMENT PROBLEM
2003
We study the market interaction of a finite number of single-product firms and a representative buyer, where the buyer consumes bundles of these goods. The buyers' value function determines their willingness to pay for subsets of goods. We show that subgame perfect Nash-equilibrium outcomes are solutions of the linear relaxation of an integer programming assignment problem and that they always exits. The (subgame perfect) Nash-equilibrium price set is characterized by the Pareto frontier of the associated dual problem's projection on the firms' price vectors. We identify the Nash-equilibrium prices for monotonic buyers' value functions and, more importantly, we show that some central soluti…