organizational change and hysteresis in british manufacturing industry a perspective from the donovan commission report labor productivity in british manufacturing industry rose significantly during the severe recession of the early 1980s contrary to historical and international parallels furthermore labor productivity continued to rise during the rest of the decade despite the return of output to its pre 1980 level the author explains these stylized facts by analyzing wage work rule negotiations as a three person noncooperative bargaining game in which workers with different skills negotiate independently this model attempts to capture the insights of a royal commission on industrial relations the author also argues that this explanation of the stylized facts is consistent with the available evidence copyright 1995 by the london school of economics and political science

information transmission cournot and bertrand equilibria we examine how incentives for two duopolists to honestly share information change depending upon the nature of competition cournot or bertrand and the nature of the information structure while in earlier papers uncertainty is about an unknown common demand intercept in the present paper uncertainty is about unknown private costs the different information structure reverses the incentives to share information while with unknown common demand sharing is a dominant strategy with bertrand competition and concealing is a dominant strategy with cournot competition with unknown private costs sharing is a dominant strategy with cournot competition and concealing is a dominant strategy with bertrand competition

cournot and bertrand equilibria compared substitutability complementarity and concavity abstract this paper assesses the view that bertrand equilibrium is intrinsically more competitive than cournot equilibrium we consider an oligopoly model with linear demand and a mixture of substitute and complementary products our results provide support for the conventional wisdom and also indicate its limitations we provide counter examples showing that no clear cut comparison of prices and quantities is possible without strategic complementarity in either of the two games however price competition is indeed more competitive according to the following criteria lower mark up output ratios larger average output and lower average price

unions and profitability over the 1980s some evidence on union firm bargaining in the united kingdom in this paper an attempt is made to assess the behaviour of the rate of return on sales of unionised firms as compared to the non unionised ones in the late 1980s in the united kingdom the main aim is to examine what has happened to the relationship between unionisation and profitability after the changes in the union legislation competition environment and cyclical variations that took place over this period the impact of different forms of union firm bargaining on the union profitability effect is also examined the data reveal that the negative union effect on profitability exists even after controlling for firm specific fixed effects but that it has been sharply reduced over the 1980s

the economic effects of multiple unionism evidence from the 1984 workplace industrial survey establishment level data from the 1984 workplace industrial relations survey are used to investigate the relationship between the presence of multiple recognized unions and wages financial performance and the incidence of industrial action where multiple unions are present it is found to be important to distinguish between whether they bargain separately or jointly and the most important effects are isolated where separate bargains occur the results suggest that plants with multiunionism and separate bargaining arrangements pay higher wages have lower financial performance and are more prone to strike action lasting at least one day copyright 1993 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

ricardo s international trade theory beyond the comparative cost example that the labour embodied in the export goods given in exchange for one unit of the imported good is less than the labour which the country would have to utilise if it itself were to produce one unit of the imported good there is no question that this ricardian model based on the example of england and portugal trading cloth for wine in chapter 7 of ricardo s principles of political economy and taxation 1951a is an excellent pedagogical device to illustrate the role of compara tive advantage in determining a country s trade pattern and the resulting gains from trade ricardo showed that trade enhances a country s welfare even though it may be more efficient than its trading partner in producing each of its commodities as long as its relative productivity advantage differs between them the principle of comparative advantage

price and quality competition the effect of differentiation and vertical integration abstract this paper studies an instance of price and quality competition between firms as seen in the recent internet market consumers purchase a product based on not only its price but also its quality level therefore two firms compete in determining their prices and quality levels to maximize their profits characterizing this competition from a microeconomic viewpoint we consider two possible business strategies that firms can utilize to overcome the competition the differentiation and the vertical integration with another complementary firm we show an interesting result not seen in the well known bertrand price competition not only does the differentiation always increase the firms profits but also it can increase the consumer s welfare in a quality sensitive market we further derive that under some mild conditions the monopolistic vertical integration that excludes the combination purchase with a competitor s product is beneficial for both the integrated firm and its consumers

price versus quantity rules in dynamic competition the case of nonrenewable natural resources price and quantity competition are compared in the dynamic game framework of a nonrenewable natural resource duopoly it is shown that a price decision rule quantity decision rule strategy dominates in terms of a higher present value of the initial resource stocks if the resources are complements substitutes this result is shown to hold for subgame perfect equilibria it holds although equilibrium price paths resulting from those two types of strategies will cross it is shown however that even though the price trajectories cross initial equilibrium prices resulting from the price rule strategy will be lower than the initial equilibrium prices resulting from the quantity rule strategy copyright 1990 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

a dynamic model of differentiated oligopoly with capital accumulation abstract we consider a dynamic model of differentiated oligopoly with capital accumulation we prove that the model may converge to either a steady state replicating the optimum of the static problem or a steady state driven by capital accumulation alone in the latter case the same steady state equilibrium is observed under both cournot and bertrand competition as well as social planning journal of economic literature classifications numbers c73 l13

on the microeconomic foundations of linear demand for differentiated products abstract this paper provides a thorough exploration of the microeconomic foundations for the multi variate linear demand function for differentiated products which is widely used in industrial organization the setting is the standard representative consumer with a quasi linear utility function a key finding is that strict concavity of the quadratic utility function is critical for the demand system to be well defined otherwise the true demand function may be quite complex multi valued non linear and income dependent we uncover failures of duality relationships between substitute products and complementary products as well as the incompatibility between high levels of complementarity and concavity the two good case emerges as a special case with strong but non robust properties a key implication is that all conclusions derived in applied economic models via the use of linear demand that does not satisfy the law of demand ought to be regarded with some suspicion

free riding in noncooperative entry deterrence with differentiated products 1 introductionthis paper reexamines the phenomenon of free riding in entry deterrence when established firms in an oligopoly are unable to coordinate their entry preventing activities previous authors e g bernheim 1984 gilbert and vives 1986 waldman 1987 1991 appelbaum and weber 1992 have highlighted the public good aspect of noncooperative entry prevention if costly entry deterring actions are successfully undertaken by a proper subset of the incumbents then incumbents outside of that subset cannot be excluded from the benefits of deterred entry it is in this sense that entry deterrence acquires the nature of a public good this observation has prompted previous researchers to raise the free rider question with its associated welfare implications can there occur underinvestment in entry deterrence due to the incentive for each firm to free ride on the others costly entry preventing activities the free rider problem in entry deterrence is first mentioned in the sequential entry model of bernheim 1984 however though bernheim discusses the possibility of free riding in his model the free rider problem is not the main focus of his paper in fact as pointed out by waldman 1987 p 309 footnote 2 the author s discussion of the role of the free rider problem is somewhat vague as regards whether bernheim feels the free rider problem would ever be important in a noncooperative entry deterrence setting 1gilbert and vives 1986 is the first paper in which the underinvestment issue is explicitly addressed the authors define underinvestment in entry deterrence to be associated with one or more of the following a incumbents total profits are higher preventing than allowing entry but the unique industry equilibrium allows entry b either entry prevention or entry may be an industry equilibrium but incumbents profits are higher when entry is prevented c an established monopoly or colluding incumbents prevents entry in more situations than an established noncooperating oligopoly p 77 label a b and c as underinvestment of type 1 2 and 3 respectively gilbert and vives g v go on to show that in none of these respects is there underinvestment in their quantity setting homogeneous product model on the contrary they demonstrate a strong possibility of overinvestment g v consider a situation where symmetric noncooperative incumbents with constant marginal costs of production make credible commitments to outputs in the preentry stage 2 the entrant incurs a fixed entry cost if it enters the industry and makes its entry and output decision after observing the incumbents output choices consequently there exists a limit output which if jointly produced by the oligopoly deters entry 3 g v find that entry is prevented when limit outputs are small while entry is allowed for larger limit outputs for limit outputs in an intermediate range both allowing entry and preventing entry are equilibria they prove that in this intermediate range where both entry accommodating and entry preventing equilibria coexist the unique entry equilibrium pareto dominates every deterrence equilibrium in other words compared with any deterrence equilibrium there is typically a continuum of such equilibria the accommodation equilibrium yields strictly higher profits to every incumbent hence if the industry settles on an entry preventing equilibrium the implication is that overinvestment exists because by jointly reducing incumbents outputs and allowing entry every incumbent can be made better off this paper introduces product differentiation into the g v model and shows that sufficiently large amounts of product differentiation can generate underinvestment in entry prevention the intuition is straightforward consider an incumbent s profit in any entry deterring equilibrium where exactly the limit output is produced by the oligopoly

oligopoly equilibria when firms have local knowledge of demand this paper investigates the existence of oligopoly equilibria when firms arrive through local price experiments at a correct estimation of their demand curves in a neighborhood of a given statu s quo the author provides sufficient conditions for the existence of a local nash equilibrium defined as a point where each firm is at a local maximum of its profit function given the prices charged by th e other firms he also provides two examples one of a duopoly with l ocal nash equilibria but no nash equilibria and the other of a duopol y with no local nash equilibria copyright 1988 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

games with strategic complementarities new applications to industrial organization this paper provides an introduction to the analysis of games with strategic complementarities and applications to industrial organization oligopoly pricing comparative statics and a taxonomy of strategic behavior in two stage games

north south trade and capital flows in a ricardian model of accumulation abstract a class based asymmetric general equilibrium model of the world economy is developed to trace the trajectory of the north south terms of trade the world profit rate the northern real wage and the level of southern employment in the presence of capital accumulation and technical progress it is shown that i accumulation must be accompanied by a continuing deterioration in the terms of trade of the south and may entail a cumulative contraction in its level of employment and ii technical progress in the south will of necessity produce a long run worsening of its terms of trade and assuming world demand for southern goods is priceinelastic of its level of unemployment

second best cost benefit analysis in monopolistic competition models of urban agglomeration abstract this paper examines the agglomeration benefits of a transportation improvement in a city by modeling the microstructure of urban agglomeration based on monopolistic competition of differentiated intermediate products properly extended to include variety distortion in addition to price distortion harberger s measure of excess burden yields the agglomeration benefits the agglomeration benefits are positive if increasing the variety is procompetitive however in the anticompetitive case we cannot exclude the possibility of negative additional benefits if there are multiple cities the net agglomeration benefits can be negative when other cities that experience a reduction in population have larger agglomeration economies

from stationary state to endogenous growth international trade in the mathematical formulation of the ricardian system in his 1814 15 correspondence with malthus and in his essay on profits ricardo championed the free importation of wage goods as a highly effective growth enhancing policy in order to capture this aspect in the mathematical formulation of the ricardian system first introduced by pasinetti in 1960 in the context of a closed economy we produce a variant of that model where the economy is a small open one we show that this economy is characterised by endogenous growth since the growth rate is bounded from below and we locate two thresholds concerning the allocation of labour among the two sectors of the economy and the pattern of international trade

outsourcing vertical integration and price vs quantity competition abstract we show that standard conclusions about duopoly competition can be reversed when the production of key inputs is outsourced to a vertically integrated retail competitor with upstream market power under such outsourcing bertrand competition can produce higher prices higher industry profit lower consumer surplus and lower total surplus than cournot competition in addition to limiting the intensity of retail competition bertrand competition can limit the extent of wholesale competition by reducing the incentive of retail providers to produce key inputs themselves

inverted u aggregate investment curves in a dynamic game of advertising abstract we revisit the relationship between market power and firms investment incentives in a noncooperative differential oligopoly game where firms sell differentiated goods and invest in advertising to increase the brand equity of their respective goods the feedback equilibrium obtains under open loop rules and aggregate expenditure on goodwill takes an inverted u shape under both cournot and bertrand behaviour provided product differentiation is sufficiently high total industry expenditure is higher under cournot competition

europe s industrialization and colonial underdevelopment in the light of ricardo s corn model abstract the paper discusses the dynamics of sectoral resource allocation in an extension of ricardo s corn model to a north south world system it is shown that free trade and capital mobility in the presence of capital accumulation must entail in the flexible wage metropolis a secular shift of resources out of agriculture into manufacturing accompanied by real wage growth in the labor surplus colonies a necessary expansion of commerical agriculture but an ambiguous evolution of manufacturing output and employment giving rise to the possibility of a secular contraction in overall colonial market employment

technical note a comparison of bertrand and cournot profits in oligopolies with differentiated products we compare equilibrium profits of bertrand price and cournot quantity competition in oligopolies with an arbitrary number of nonsymmetric firms offering differentiated substitutable products under an affine demand function we provide a precise characterization of the profit relationship in terms of 1 the number of firms 2 their relative quality and cost differences and 3 the competition intensity defined as the maxiumum absolute value of total change in competitors demand over change in own demand due to a unit change in own price we first examine the case where firms have the same demand sensitivity to own price and the same demand sensitivity to competitor prices but different cost and quality parameters for this case we prove that the total profit of the industry under cournot competition is at least as high as the total profit under bertrand competition if the number of firms is less than 28 or if the competition intensity is less than 0 909 or if the differences in quality and cost competitiveness between firms are small we also prove that for each firm the profit achieved under cournot competition is at least as high as the profit achieved under bertrand competition if the number of firms is less than eight or if the competition intensity is less than 0 739 we then provide numerical and analytical results that qualitatively support the same conclusions for general affine demand functions with variable demand sensitivities to prices

strategic underinvestment in informative advertising the cases of substitutes and complements the authors analyze the strategic pricing and informative advertising decisions made by firms in duopolistic contexts they show that whether the products are substitutes or complements there exist strategic settings in which firms keep potential consumers uninformed about their products even if the advertising cost is zero

comparing bertrand and cournot in mixed markets abstract we revisit the classic comparison between bertrand and cournot outcomes in a mixed market with private and public firms the results are often strikingly different and opposite to the ones obtained from a similar comparison in the standard setting with all profit maximizing firms

a dynamic model of quality competition with endogenous prices abstract we develop a dynamic model of price and quality competition in order to analyze the effects of competition on quality provision and to which extent an unregulated market is able to provide a socially optimal quality level our model combines a differential game approach with a hotelling spatial competition framework and our analysis applies in particular to industries such as long term care health care child care and education if providers nursing homes hospitals schools nurseries use closed loop decision rules which imply strategic interaction over time we show that although increased competition leads to higher quality in the steady state quality provision is nevertheless lower than under open loop rules and also suboptimally low from a welfare perspective thus our analysis identifies dynamic strategic interaction between competing providers as a potential source of inefficiency in quality provision

equilibrium prices in the bertrand and cournot oligopolies abstract the equilibrium prices for the bertrand and cournot oligopolies with product differentiation are compared if all firms have linear demand and cost functions and if in addition the jacobian matrix of the demand functions has a dominant negative diagonal the cournot equilibrium prices are not lower than the bertrand ones the general condition for the comparison of the bertrand and cournot equilibrium prices can be derived even if the nonlinearity is involved in the cost and or demand functions

price vs quantity competition in oligopoly supergames abstract in a repeated oligopoly with differentiated products and firms following trigger strategies quantity competition leads to a less efficient outcome than price competition this result contrasts with the repeated duopoly result where price competition is less efficient under certain conditions

union competition and strikes the need for analysis at the sector level international comparative research has found that strike incidence is higher where two or more unions bargain with an employer multi unionism as is common in most european countries than where only one union does all else equal two proposed explanations for this relationship both invoking inter union rivalry as the main dynamic are that under multi unionism unions a make propagandistic use of strikes to attract members or b compete with each other by bidding up bargaining demands to date the evidence bearing on these hypotheses has been equivocal because the author argues researchers have focused on activity at the national level rather than at the lower levels that are more commonly the nexus for strike formation the author performs empirical tests using industry sector level data for seven european countries for the years 1990 2006 and finds evidence clearly favoring the competitive bargaining hypothesis over the propaganda hypothesis

on the strategic importance of prices versus quantities in this article i investigate three single shot models of differentiated products oligopoly in each model firms choose both output and price the demand cost and spillover demand specifications are quite general and there are three main results first with simultaneous choice there is no pure strategy noncooperative equilibrium second with output chosen first and announced to all firms before the choice of price equilibrium sometimes exists and when it does it is the same as in a quantity only model third with price chosen and announced first equilibrium always exists and is the same as in a price only model

on the efficiency of bertrand and cournot equilibria with product differentation in a differentiated products setting with n varieties it is shown under certain regularity conditions that if the demand structure is symmetric and bertrand and cournot equilibria are unique then prices and profits are larger and quantities smaller in cournot than in bertrand competition and as n grows both equilibria converge to the efficient outcome at a rate of at least 1n if bertrand reaction functions slope upwards and are continuous then even with an asymmetric demand structure given any cournot equilibrium price vector one can find a bertrand equilibrium with lower prices in particular if the bertrand equilibrium is unique then it has lower prices than any cournot equilibrium

conjectural variations and location theory abstract imperfectly competitive markets such as those involving spatial separation of producers and consumers are characterized by interactions between competing firms actions call forth reactions and the possible reactions form an important part of the information set that should be used to determine the initial actions one method for dealing with this is the conjectoral variation approach despite some shortcomings this methodology sheds considerable light on decision making in the space economy equally importantly it sheds light on more general microeconomies modelled as spatial analogs this paper shows that conjectural variations and the nature of competition between rival firms do indeed matter in location choice and more generally in product design in particular we shall be concerned with showing how the conjectured responses of rival firms affect their desire to agglomerate

anything goes with heterogeneous but not always with homogeneous oligopoly abstract corchon and mas colell 1996 on the stability of best reply and gradient systems with applications to imperfectly competitive models economics letters 51 59 65 showed that in heterogeneous oligopoly almost everything is possible in order to obtain a similar result for homogeneous oligopoly either one needs an externality in the cost function or the reaction correspondences should fulfill a special condition

prisoners dilemma in duopoly super games abstract the choice between quantity and price in order to stabilize collusion is modeled here it is shown that this relocates the prisoners dilemma backward from the market stage to the stage where the market variable is chosen in order to sustain collusion and where discount rates appear as the payoffs likewise a prisoners dilemma arises also when both the market variable and the type of behavior cooperative or non cooperative are simultaneously chosen journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d43 l13

reply on comment to small firms and the merger mania research on performance differences between small and large firms is booming it emerges relatively separated from the mainstream industrial organization literature inspired by levy s comment on an earlier paper we try to bridge the gap between the two areas especially we screen non cooperative game theoretical models for predictions on performance differences most of them forecast higher profits for larger firms but there exist also some models which predict the opposite for very specific circumstances

evolution to equilibrium in an asymmetric oligopoly with differentiated goods abstract we present results on finite population evolutionarily stable strategies esss and stochastically stable states for a model of evolution with an imitative rule of strategy choice in an asymmetric oligopoly with differentiated goods and two groups of firms one group of low cost firms and one of high cost firms the firms play price setting and quantity setting oligopoly games under linear demand functions we will show that the stochastically stable state in a price setting oligopoly and that in a quantity setting oligopoly coincide

pricing decisions for complementary products with firms different market powers abstract this article reports the results of a study that explores the pricing problems with regard to two complementary products in a supply chain with two manufacturers and one common retailer the authors establish five pricing models under decentralized decision cases including the ms bertrand ms stackelberg rs bertrand rs stackelberg and ng models with consideration of different market power structures among channel members by applying a game theoretical approach corresponding analytic solutions are obtained then by comparing the maximum profits and optimal pricing decisions obtained in different decision cases interesting and valuable managerial insights are established

effects of union organization on strike incidence in eu companies the author reinvestigates the relationship between the organizational power of trade unions and strikes based on data from the european company survey 2009 ecs 2009 and the institutional characteristics of trade unions wage setting state intervention and social pacts ictwss database which include more than 5 000 firms across all 27 european union eu member states he shows that the incidence of strikes is higher in companies for which workplace union membership is high the number of workplace unions is high and unions dominate establishment level works councils these factors interact to affect strike incidence in addition the company level effects of union organization on strike incidence vary across countries these country differences can partially be explained by differences in national trade union systems such as decentralization and membership density

on stackelberg games in a homogeneous product market abstract in a homogeneous product duopoly with concave demand and strictly convex costs we bring together all the standard results of quantity stackelberg games provide some new results with price stackelberg games and compare the equilibrium configuration of the quantity games with the price games in the price stackelberg game we show there is a unique spne where the leader chooses a lower price than the follower but both get equal payoffs we prove that generally quantity stackelberg games are less competitive than price stackelberg games however we also demonstrate the possibility of a reversal of this result

trade unions and training practices in british workplaces the authors use british establishment level data from the 1991 employers manpower and skills practices survey emsps and individual level data from the autumn 1993 quarterly labour force survey qlfs to investigate the links between training provision and workplace unionization both the probability of receiving training and the amount of training received are found to have been substantially higher in unionized than in nonunion workplaces the authors view these results as showing that trade unions can play an important role in developing and boosting skill formation in britain

two state capital accumulation with heterogenous products disruptive vs non disruptive goods the paper considers the problem of a firm that while producing a standard product has the option to introduce an innovative product the innovative product competes with the standard product and will therefore reduce revenues of the standard product a distinction is made between innovative products that do or do not become even more relatively appealing as their market share grows e g because of network externalities it is shown that in the former case which we call a disruptive good history dependent long run equilibria can occur which are in line with recent real life economic examples

rethinking classical trade analyses within a framework of capitalist development a classical trade theory which comprises smith s productivity theory ricardo s reasoning against the corn laws torrens s argument for extended colonisation and mill s recommendation to send capital abroad is advanced it portrays england s economic expansion in the nineteenth century lacunae exist however because of these economists belief in the automatic spread of industries to the agricultural countries and their inattention to the economic advances made by the late coming capitalist countries as well as the impact of england s capital exports on the capital importing countries subsequent researches which address these and which relate to current debates on theories and policies are discussed 1996 academic press limited

the validity of the long run heckscher ohlin theorem in the ricardian system applying burgstaller s ricardian two sector growth model to the two country open economy this paper shows that the long run heckscher ohlin theorem holds also in a ricardian world in addition it is shown that if two ricardian countries that are different only in their demand parameters open trade comparative advantage and the corresponding trade pattern at trade opening continue in the long run after the opening of trade

timing of technology adoption and product market competition abstract this paper examines how product market competition affects firms timing of adopting a new technology as well as whether the market provides sufficient adoption incentives it demonstrates that adoption dates differ not only among symmetric firms but also among markets with different market features more specifically technology adoption can occur earlier in a market with cournot competition than in a market with bertrand competition it can also occur earlier in a market in which goods are not too close substitutes therefore this paper shows that competition toughness does not always reinforce adoption incentives when goods are sufficiently differentiated adoption occurs later than is socially optimal

on the markovian efficiency of bertrand and cournot equilibria we characterize and compare closed loop feedback price and quantity strategies within a full fledged dynamic model of oligopolistic competition in which production requires exploitation of a renewable productive asset unlike previous papers on the strategic exploitation of productive assets we allow for imperfect product substitutability which enables us to deal with price competition we show that the traditional result that the bertrand equilibrium is more efficient than the cournot equilibrium does not necessarily hold in a markovian environment either in the short run or at the stationary equilibrium or using the discounted sum of welfare as a criterion for relative efficiency

factor proportions and ricardian comparative advantage thoughts on uchiyama in a ricardo pasinetti world inferring a long run comparative advantage from a stationary state factor proportions differential is invalid since the latter may be present in the absence of the former and will be a consequence not the cause of long run comparative advantage where such exists

price vs quantity competition in a vertically related market this paper demonstrates that the standard conclusions regarding the comparison of cournot and bertrand competition are reversed in a vertically related market with upstream monopoly and trading via two part tariffs in such a market downstream cournot competition yields higher output lower wholesale prices lower final prices higher consumers surplus and higher total welfare than bertrand competition

comparing cournot and bertrand in a homogeneous product market abstract this paper examines some general notions relating to the comparison of cournot and bertrand equilibrium outcomes results obtained by vives in this connection are reconsidered in a homogeneous product market and it is shown that these results are sensitive to the market sharing rules it is found that the results are always true under those market sharing rules which have the property of including the competitive equilibrium in the set of bertrand equilibria for example the capacity sharing rule if however the sharing rule does not have this property for example the equal sharing rule then the results referred to above may not hold when costs are asymmetric journal of economic literatureclassification numbers l13

unifying ricardo s theories of growth and comparative advantage the paper formally integrates ricardo s two sector growth model with his theory of comparative advantage differences with conventional representations of ricardian trade theory as well as with heckscher ohlin samuelson theory are noted it is shown that the ricardian equilibrium terms of trade are fully determinate as against the standard millian view also trade may depending on direction of specialization inhibit rather than promote growth and lead to a net contraction of the world economy copyright 1986 by the review of economic studies limited

manufacturer s revenue sharing contract and retail competition this paper investigates a revenue sharing contract for coordinating a supply chain comprising one manufacturer and two competing retailers the manufacturer as a stackelberg leader offers a revenue sharing contract to two competing retailers who face stochastic demand before the selling season under the offered contract terms the competing retailers are to determine the quantities to be ordered from the manufacturer prior to the season and the retail price at which to sell the items during the season the process of pricing and ordering is expected to result in an equilibrium as in the bayesian nash game on the basis of anticipated responses and actions of the retailers the manufacturer designs the revenue sharing contract adopting the classic newsvendor problem model framework and using numerical methods the study finds that the provision of revenue sharing in the contract can obtain better performance than a price only contract however the benefits earned under the revenue sharing contract by different supply chain partners differ because of the impact of demand variability and price sensitivity factors the paper also analyses the impact of demand variability on decisions about optimal retail price order quantity and profit sharing between the manufacturer and the retailers lastly it investigates how the competition between retailers factor influences the decision making of supply chain members in response to uncertain demand and profit variability