walrasian equilibria as limits of noncooperative equilibria part i mixed strategies abstract we examine the connection between walrasian equilibria of a limit economy with infinitesimal firms and the noncooperative cournot equilibria of approximating finite economies with significant firms following earlier work of novshek and sonnenschein we allow for set up cost and permit a minimal form of mixed strategies we depart from them by requiring that the aggregate production set exhibits some degree however small of decreasing returns contrasting with their results it is shown that a regular walrasian equilibrium of a limit economy can always be approximated by a sequence of noncooperative equilibria for the tail of the approximating finite economies thus there is a surprising qualitative discontinuity when one passes from the novshek sonnenschein case of aggregate constant returns to scale of the decreasing returns case of this paper

oligopoly game price makers meet price takers abstract the paper studies an oligopoly game where firms can choose between price taking and price making strategies on a mixed market price takers are always better off than price makers though the profits of both types decline in the number of price takers we investigate and confront two possibilities of firms decisions about their types forward looking equilibrium reasoning and backward looking individual learning we find that the cournot outcome is the only equilibrium prediction and it is learnable if firms are sufficiently sensitive to profit differences however with a larger number of firms a unilateral deviation from cournot behavior becomes profitable under learning this incentive creates a space for permanent oscillations over different markets with a positive but low number of price takers

duopolistic vertical restraints abstract in an industry where competition exists at the wholesale level vertical restraints are not necessarily desirable from the standpoint of the manufacturers when vertical restraints are employed it is never in the form of retail price maintenance but rather in the form of franchise fee pricing when the products produced by the manufacturers are only slightly differentiated the producers may benefit from the double marginalization that arises with linear pricing such double marginalization results in higher retail prices which relieve competitive pressures

downstream merger and welfare in a bilateral oligopoly i analyse the effects of a downstream merger in a differentiated oligopoly when there is bargaining between downstream firms and upstream agents firms or unions bargaining outcomes can be observable or unobservable by rivals when competition is in quantities upstream agents are independent and bargaining is over a uniform input price a merger between downstream firms may raise consumer surplus and overall welfare however when competition is in prices or the upstream agents are not independent or bargaining is over a two part tariff or bargaining covers both the input price and the level of output the standard welfare results are restored a downstream merger always reduces consumer surplus and overall welfare

precommitment in competing vertical chains the design of distribution channels is an important marketing decision since a revision implies costly reorganization hence it makes sense to study strategic motives of alternative distribution devices a precommitment is a strategic move that affects the other players expectations on how oneself will behave and thus induces them to choose in one s own favor schelling 1960 how these tactics can be used by firms to favorably influence competition between vertical chains is the topic of the literature reviewed in this survey jel classification l22 l42 l81

where enterprises lead people follow links between migration and fdi in germany abstract standard neoclassical models of economic integration are based on the assumptions that capital and labor are substitutes and that the geography of factor market integration does not matter yet these two assumptions are violated if agglomeration forces among factors from specific source countries are at work agglomeration implies that factors behave as complements and that the country of origin matters this paper analyzes agglomeration between capital and labor empirically we use state level german data to answer the question whether and how migration and foreign direct investment fdi are linked stocks of inward fdi and of immigrants have similar determinants and the geography of factor market integration matters there are higher stocks of inward fdi in german states hosting a large foreign population from the same country of origin this agglomeration effect is confined to higher income source countries

a sraffian critique of the classical notion of centre of gravitation in this paper we use insights from sraffa s classic production of commodities by means of commodities to argue that the classical notion of centre of gravitation is not a sound concept the market mechanics of labour allocation through price signals and quantity adjustments given effectual demands do not lead to a centre of gravitation we work out all such possible market mechanisms including the specific classical case and show that the centre of gravitation is a non attractive point in all cases copyright the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

the objective demand curve in general equilibrium with price makers objective demand curves in general equilibrium with explicitly modeled price makers have been defined so far in a number of specific cases this paper gives a general definition of such an objective demand curve the associated general equilibrium concept is defined and sufficient existence conditions are given copyright 1987 by royal economic society

general equilibrium theory with imperfect competition abstract this survey is organized as follows i introduction ii the main issues iii negishi s model iv objective demand in the cournot nash framework v objective demand in the bertrand nash framework vi the assumption of quasi concavity of the profit functions vii compromises between the conjectural and the objective approach viii insights into the notion of perfect competition ix conclusion

estimating markups and market conduct with multidimensional product attributes we demonstrate how to estimate a model of oligopoly pricing when products are multi dimensionally differentiated we provide an empirical counterpart to recent theoretical work on product differentiation using specifications informed by economic theory we estimate price cost margins for products differentiated in many dimensions

competition and price variation when consumers are loss averse we modify the salop 1979 model of price competition with differentiated products by assuming that consumers are loss averse relative to a reference point given by their recent expectations about the purchase consumers sensitivity to losses in money increases the price responsiveness of demand and hence the intensity of competition at higher relative to lower market prices reducing or eliminating price variation both within and between products when firms face common stochastic costs in any symmetric equilibrium the markup is strictly decreasing in cost even when firms face different cost distributions we identify conditions under which a focal price equilibrium where firms always charge the same focal price exists and conditions under which any equilibrium is focal

the chaotic duopolists revisited the adjustment process of three oligopolists is studied under cournot and stackelberg action it is demonstrated that with an iso elastic demand function and constant marginal costs the system can result in periodic or in chaotic behaviour in particular the case with two identical and one different oligopolists is focused which turns into a virtual duopoly though displaying a wider set of bifurcations than can occur in genuine duopoly

monopolistic quantity rationing in this paper we address the question of whether a price setting monopolist can improve his welfare by imposing quantity constraints on buyers we show first that if all buyers are identical quantity rations are not useful for the monopolist we then show by means of an example that if buyers are diverse quantity rations may be desirable it is shown that if there are only two commodities the only constraint that may be useful to the monopolist is a zero constraint on one of the two commodities an example shows that this property does not hold for more than two commodities

bertrand the cournot paradigm and the theory of perfect competition in this paper we extend to a general equilibrium context bertrand s classic critique of cournot we present a game theoretic model of a pure exchange monetary economy in which buyers as well as sellers announce both quantities and prices when buyers act strategically the edgeworth nonexistence problem is circumvented under weak conditions a pure strategy nash equilibrium exists for this game we make precise the bertrand idea that when agents in a finite economy are permitted to compete by price the resulting allocations will be competitive specifically the nash equilibria for our game yield allocations that are competitive allocations for the underlying exchange economy provided that there are at least two buyers and two sellers actively trading in every market under this characterization of strategic behaviour then two is enough for competition our objective is to provide a general equilibrium game theoretic formulation of the idea of bertrand price competition bertrand s classic critique of cournot can be paraphrased as follows when agents regard price rather than quantity as the strategic variable no price above the competitive equilibrium price can be sustained as a noncooperative equilibrium this idea is made precise in our game theoretic model of a pure exchange economy in which buyers as well as sellers act strategically our treatment of buyers behaviour is novel while sellers announce price and quantity vectors buyers specify sums of money and menus of alternative nonmonetary commodity bundles a buyer s action is a commitment to purchase any one of the specified commodity bundles in exchange for the sum of money our first result is that under weak conditions a nash equilibrium in pure strategies exists the paper thus also points to a way of resolving the classical edgeworth nonexistence problem second all nash equilibria yield allocations that are competitive for the underlying economy provided that in every market at least two buyers and two sellers are actively trading under this characterization of strategic

an equilibrium model with involuntary unemployment at flexible competitive prices and wages this paper presents a general equilibrium model in which all prices and quantities transacted are the direct choices of econom ic agents there is no walrasian auctioneer multiple subgame perfect equilibria exist with prices and wages at their walrasian levels among the equilibrium allocations are the walrasian ones but there a re also outcomes in which price and wage taking workers are rationed in the labor market and are unable to sell all the labor they want a t the prevailing wage this involuntary unemployment results from sel f fulfilling expectations of inadequate excess demand as in some inte rpretations of keynes s ideas copyright 1987 by american economic association

introduction to the stability of rational expectations equilibrium abstract this paper surveys the literature which examines the stability of the expectations that agents are assumed to have in a rational expectations equilibrium ree this issue is more complex than the usual statistical estimation problem because the relationship between observable variables and payoff relevant variables is endogenous one approach taken in the literature yields convergence to a ree but requires agents to have extensive knowledge about the structure and dynamics of the model that prevails while they learn a second approach does not assume that agents have correctly specified likelihood functions and finds that ree may not be stable

cournot walras and locally consistent equilibria abstract a kth order locally consistent equilibrium k lce is an imperfectly competitive general equilibrium allocation at which firms perceive only a kth order taylor expansion of their true demand curves it is shown that under simple regularity conditions the set of kth order locally consistent equilibrium strategies coincides with the set of cournot walras equilibria as soon as k 1 in addition a characterization of the set of negishi equilibria or 0 lces and an existence result for 1 lces in private ownership economies are provided

dynamic complexity in duopoly games abstract we discuss the occurrence of periodic and chaotic phenomena in infinite horizon duopoly games where firms maximize their discounted sum of profits and use markov perfect equilibrium strategies in the alternating case their corresponding actions are then constrained orbits of a map similar to a cournot t tonnement we show that any behavior is possible for small discount factors and that one obtains the cournot t tonnement as the discount factor goes to zero in the simultaneous case we show by mean of an example that many cournot t tonnements can be viewed as markov perfect equilibria of an infinite horizon game and that one obtains the nash equilibrium of the static game as the discount parameter goes to zero we are thus led to study in detail the dynamical properties of a cournot t tonnement

caution implies profit abstract the paper illustrates by simple cobweb models that under certain circumstances fluctuations in perpetual disequilibrium may not only be viable but also preferable to a competitive equilibrium from the long run perspective

a cautious price adjustment mechanism chaotic behavior abstract it is well known that adjustment processes like tatonnement can show erratic dynamic behavior the prices can make big jumps and vary over a wide range a discrete tatonnement process in a simple two goods economy is studied with only one price adjusted it is shown that the interval in which the price varies can be restricted to a neighborhood of an equilibrium price with big jumps excluded if the relative price adjustment is restricted by a maximal rate of increase or decrease of the price within the interval any type of erratic dynamics remains possible

on the dampening of competition effect of exclusive dealing the authors compare and contrast the profit and welfare effects of exclusive dealing sales through a common retailer and vertical integration as did y j lin 1990 the authors find that imperfectly competitive manufacturers prefer to impose exclusive dealing on their retailers unlike lin the authors find that welfare is higher under exclusive dealing than when products are sold through a common retailer this finding suggests a new interpretation of the standard stations v united states 1949 antitrust case copyright 1993 by blackwell publishing ltd

public facility location and urban spatial structure equilibrium and welfare analysis we consider a model in which the location of a single public facility is fixed somewhere in an urban area there are two firms that choose locations the locations of households competing for space in the land market are also endogenous the analysis examines the nature of the spatial equilibrium and shows that different kinds of equilibria can emerge depending on the parameters of the model the welfare implications of changes in transportation cost and the location of the public facility are studied and appear to be non standard for some equilibrium configurations

limited knowledge of demand and oligopoly equilibria abstract in a standard model of oligopoly with differentiated products the existence of an equilibrium at which the first order conditions for profit maximisation are simultaneously satisfied for all firms is proved and this is done without imposing any restrictions on the demand functions this is an equilibrium in the following sense although some firms may not necessarily be maximising their profits nevertheless if each firm s knowledge of demand is limited to the linear approximation of its own demand curve then it will believe that it is indeed maximising its profits

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

general equilibrium with free entry a synthetic approach to the theory of perfect competition the purpose of this essay is to explain a new theory of perfect competition that synthesizes the arrow debreu mckenzie and marshallian theories and summarizes the recent work of a large number of researchers the synthetic theory provides a logically precise general equilibrium framework that can be used both for positive analysis as well as to form a basis for the classical theorems of welfare economics in these aspects it follows the adm theory however as in the marshallian theory there is free entry in the form of an unbounded pool of firms which have access to the existing technology also as in the marshallian theory the average cost curves available to each firm are u shaped in contrast to both the marshallian and the adm theories we do not take price taking as a hypothesis we use the term perfect competition to describe a situation in which firms are arbitrarily small relative to the markets in which they are involved the firms in our model correctly perceive the effect of the amount that they place on the market on prices and they act to maximize profit with this in mind perfectly competitive equilibria are defined as the limit points of equilibria as firms become small relative to the market and following cournot we observe that as firms become small their ability to influence price disappears a new condition is identified which is important for the viability of competitive markets loosely speaking this condition requires that prices provide the proper entry signals for firms if one thinks of each firm as associated with the use of an unpriced and nondivisible resource sometimes referred to as entrepreneurship then in equilibrium the returns to that factor must fall with entry and rise with exit not only the stability theorems of the synthetic theory but also the existence theorem reject the application of the competitive model to a regime in which entry drives up and exit reduces the profit of similar firms

observable contracts strategic delegation and cooperation the role of commitments in noncooperative games is well acknowledged and documented one way to achieve commitments is by letting delegates represent the players of a game in this paper the authors study a delegation game in which the players can use agents strategically to play on their behalf and the contracts they sign with them are common knowledge they show that in such cases every pareto optimal outcome of the game can become the unique subgame perfect nash equilibrium of the delegation game the authors demonstrate this result by discussing the cournot type duopolistic game copyright 1991 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

a remark on conjectural equilibria the notion of a conjectural equilibrium was introduced by hahn 1978 the underlying idea is to explain why prices may not change in a situation where markets do not clear and rationing occurs in a conjectural equilibrium prices are rigid because it is not in the interest of agents to change them more precisely agents conjecture prices at which they can achieve a trade beyond the given quantity constraints such that it is better for them to trade at the observed market prices within the constraints therefore the question of whether an allocation for given prices and quantity constraints is a conjectural equilibrium depends crucially on the agents conjectures in this situation by allowing arbitrary conjectures many such equilibria will exist as has already been claimed by hahn 1977 a 1977b and 1978 in this note it is shown that there are as many conjectural equilibria as there exist fixed price equilibria which satisfy the condition of voluntary exchange only to be more specific we prove that any conjectural equilibrium is a fixed price equilibrium and that for a given economy there are conjectures such that any fixed price equilibrium is a conjectural equilibrium in other words the kind of endogenous price setting described in hahn s model turns out to be equivalent to the fix price approach in the sense that both lead to the same allocations in the economy the result confirms the statement in drazen 1980 that by allowing arbitrary conjectures only one exogenous variable prices has been replaced by another conjectures

vertical integration and vertical restraints this paper surveys the field of vertical integration and vertical restraints with particular reference to implications for competition policy it outlines the existing legal framework then discusses some particular u k examples involving vertical restraints the theoretical discussion includes analyses of technological economies transactions costs contractual rights monopoly effects verticle restraints as externalities interbrand versus intrabrand competition the strategic effects of vertical separation and agency issues some policy implications are drawn amongst these being the points that vertical linkages can have strong anticompetitive effects that there is little support for separate treatment of resale price maintenance that policy should focus on economic effects rather than legal form that the case for the block exemption of franchising in the ec is unclear and that the law has failed to take the implications of the vertical separation literature into account copyright 1993 by oxford university press

do slotting allowances harm retail competition slotting allowances are fees paid by manufacturers to get access to retailers shelf space both in the usa and europe the use of slotting allowances has attracted attention in the general press as well as among policy makers and economists one school of thought claims that slotting allowances are efficiency enhancing while another school of thought maintains that slotting allowances are used in an anti competitive manner in this paper we argue that this controversy is partially caused by inadequate assumptions of how the retail market is structured and organized using a formal model we show that there are good reasons to expect anti competitive effects of slotting allowances we further point out that competi tion authorities tend to use an unsatisfactory basis for comparison when analyzing welfare consequences of slotting allowances

the classicals and the neoclassicals a rejoinder to frank hahn refutes the classical and marxist analysis of prices and competition presentation of an intertemporal equilibrium model in a simple formalism possibility of locating prices of production and a distributed profit rate in an intertemporal equilibrium relationship between prices in intertemporal equilibrium and prices of production ebsco

order process and morphology sraffa and wittgenstein this contribution is based on an exploration of the nature and meaning of some of sraffa s and wittgenstein s mutual ontological methodological and philosophical influences whose initial findings are set out in arena 2013 the article has two core objectives first i argue that based on earlier findings a different interpretation of sraffa s contribution to economics is possible from those that have been predominant so far and that hold that sraffa s approach is primarily a contribution to the theory of relative prices i consider the two main interpretations of sraffa s price system in this regard whilst these differ in important aspects i argue that they share a core feature namely an approach to prices based on the concept of economic or social order understood as a final outcome independent of the possible process through which this outcome can be achieved second i am interested in highlighting a number of connections between wittgenstein s works post tractatus and certain developments contained in sraffa s unpublished papers taking wittgenstein post tractatus as the starting point i proceed to argue that core concepts employed by wittgenstein are compatible with and reinforce an interpretation of sraffa s contribution in terms of a morphological and comparative analysis of the economic foundations of surplus based societies from this perspective the notions of surveyable representation and snapshot are employed to characterise an analysis in which agents are guided by social rules and the concept of mechanical causality is discarded this convergence of sraffa s and wittgenstein s approaches does not however exclude differences concerning the social facts investigated and the use of analytical tools such as mathematics

oligopoly games with local monopolistic approximation we propose an oligopoly game where quantity setting firms have incomplete information about the demand function at each time step they solve a profit maximization problem assuming a linear demand function and ignoring the effects of the competitors outputs despite such a rough approximation that we call local monopolistic approximation lma the repeated game may converge at a nash equilibrium of the game played under the assumption of full information an explicit form of the dynamical system that describes the time evolution of oligopoly games with lma is given for arbitrary differentiable demand functions provided that the cost functions are linear or quadratic in the case of isoelastic demand we show that the game based on lma always converges to a nash equilibrium this result compared with best reply dynamics shows that in this particular case less information implies more stability

do fast food chains price discriminate on the race and income characteristics of an area this article reports tests for differences in prices charged by fast food restaurants that serve markets with customers of widely divergent incomes and ethnic backgrounds the data contain detailed prices on items sold at over 400 burger king wendy s kfc and roy rogers restaurants in new jersey and pennsylvania locations i find significant differences in price based on the race and income characteristics of a zip code region when income and cost differences are taken into account meal prices rise approximately 5 for a 50 rise in the black population

learning cycles in bertrand competition with differentiated commodities and competing learning rules this paper stresses the importance of heterogeneity in learning we consider a bertrand oligopoly with firms using either least squares learning or gradient learning for determining the price we demonstrate that convergence properties of the rules are strongly affected by heterogeneity in particular gradient learning may become unstable as the number of gradient learners increases endogenous choice between the learning rules may induce cyclical switching stable gradient learning gives higher average profit than least squares learning making firms switch to gradient learning this can destabilize gradient learning which because of decreasing profits makes firms switch back to least squares learning

the coexistence of stable equilibria under least squares learning abstract in this paper we consider firms that learn about market conditions by estimating the demand function using past market data we show that learning may lead to suboptimal outcomes even when the estimated demand function perfectly fits the observations used in the regression and firms thus perceive to have learned the demand function correctly we consider the salop model with three firms and two types of consumers that differ in their sensitivity to product differences firms do not know the demand structure and they apply least squares learning to learn the demand function in each period firms estimate a linear perceived demand function and they play the perceived best response to the previous period price of the other firms this learning rule can lead to three different outcomes a self sustaining equilibrium the nash equilibrium or an asymmetric learning equilibrium in this last equilibrium one firm underestimates the demand for low prices and it attracts consumers with high sensitivity only this type of equilibrium has not been found in the literature on least squares learning before both the nash equilibrium and the asymmetric learning equilibrium are locally stable therefore the model has coexisting stable equilibria

commitment through renegotiation proof contracts with third parties the paper analyzes contracts as means of strategic commitment that is commitment against outside parties to the agreement it considers the example of an incumbent firm which enters a contractual relationship with its workers in order to deter entry it assumes away the possibility for the parties to precommit not to make pareto improving renegotiations of the agreement once entry has taken place under symmetric information the contract is thus found to be useless for entry deterrence if the incumbent firm or workers possess some private information excessive post entry production levels can however be sustained ex post since output reductions may not be incentive compatible while information asymmetries are usually welfare decreasing when the goal is optimal risk sharing they can thus be welfare improving for the contracting parties when commitment against outsiders is the goal of the contract the role of the renegotiation process as a constraint on sustainable agreements is stressed in the paper and the general relevance of strategic contractual commitment is discussed

upstream horizontal mergers vertical contracts and bargaining abstract we study horizontal mergers in the upstream sectors of vertically related industries when bargaining is present and contract types are endogenous we demonstrate that the contract types used can have significant implications for the equilibrium market structure and vice versa when trading takes place through two part tariff contracts merger incentives are absent however when the downstream firms are powerful merger incentives are restored since the merger leads then either to the exclusive or to the partial use of wholesale price contracts finally we show that whenever a merger occurs it is welfare detrimental

piero sraffa and the true object of economics the role of the unpublished manuscripts this special issue is concerned with the work of piero sraffa and with recent developments in its interpretation occasioned by the opening of the sraffa archives in late 1993 1 it brings together some of the contributions to a workshop on this theme that was sponsored by the cambridge journal of economics and held in july 2010 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of piero sraffa s major work production of commodities by means of commodities pcmc the original workshop on new perspectives on the work of piero sraffa was aimed at sraffa scholars who had taken the opportunity to engage with materials in the sraffa archives and who were interested in exploring their potential for revisiting and placing pcmc in the wider context of ongoing debates on economic philosophy economic theory and economic policy as is usually the case not all presentations made at the workshop were advanced for consideration in this special issue nor could all invitees attend heinz kurz as chief editor of the sraffa archives agreed to present his view on the relevance of the sraffa archives to research on sraffa and to comment on contributions at the workshop as well as on their final versions submitted for publication in this special issue kurz s contribution to this special issue was thus written in the short time available between the receipt of final versions and publication deadlines we are indebted to him for his cooperation in the preparation of this special issue we are especially grateful for his patience in the time taken to bring this project to publication this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

learning and pricing with models that do not explicitly incorporate competition in revenue management research and practice demand models are used that describe how demand for a seller s products depends on the decisions such as prices of that seller even in settings where the demand for a seller s products also depends on decisions of other sellers the models often do not explicitly account for such decisions it has been conjectured in the revenue management literature that such monopoly models may incorporate the effects of competition because the parameter estimates of the monopoly models are based on data collected in the presence of competition in this paper we take a closer look at such a setting to investigate the behavior of parameter estimates and decisions if monopoly models are used in the presence of competition we consider repeated pricing games in which two competing sellers use mathematical models to choose the prices of their products over the sequence of games each seller attempts to estimate the values of the parameters of a demand model that expresses demand as a function only of its own price using data comprised only of its own past prices and demand realizations we analyze the behavior of the sellers parameter estimates and prices under various assumptions regarding the sellers knowledge and estimation procedures and we identify situations in which a the sellers prices converge to the nash equilibrium associated with knowledge of the correct demand model b the sellers prices converge to the cooperative solution and c the sellers prices have many potential limit points that are neither the nash equilibrium nor the cooperative solution and that depend on the initial conditions we compare the sellers revenues at potential limit prices with their revenues at the nash equilibrium and the cooperative solution and we show that it is possible for sellers to be better off when using a monopoly model than at the nash equilibrium

the own wage elasticity of labor demand a meta regression analysis firms labor demand responses to wage changes are of key interest in empirical research and policy analysis however despite extensive research estimates of labor demand elasticities remain subject to considerable heterogeneity in this paper we conduct a comprehensive meta regression analysis to re assess the empirical literature on labor demand elasticities building on 942 elasticity estimates from 105 different studies we identify sources of variation in the absolute value of this elasticity heterogeneity due to the theoretical and empirical specification of the labor demand model different datasets used or sectors and countries considered explains more than 80 of the variation in the estimates we further find substantial evidence for the presence of publication selection bias as estimates of the own wage elasticity of labor demand are upwardly inflated

linear inequality methods to enforce partnerships under uncertainty an overview we review different generic conditions on stochastic outcome functions to enforce either efficient or nearly efficient partnerships their logical relationship is explored two kinds of conditions are considered however the property for an action profile to be compatible plays a crucial role in both kinds also two kinds of enforcement mechanisms are considered enforcement through utility transfers and enforcement through repetition

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

monopolistic competition and bounded rationality abstract this paper shows how a market reaches a unique steady state in monopolistic competition without knowing anything about strategic interdependence and only perceiving a linear demand for its own product every firm follows a simple price strategy to maximize its current profit in each period the strategy is based on a firm s own cost function slope estimate and its sales and price in the previous period we show that a market with asymmetric and non linear demand converges to a unique steady state under rather general conditions

an evolutionary cournot model with limited market knowledge abstract in this paper we analyze a dynamic game of cournot competition with heterogeneous firms choosing between two different adaptive behavioral rules in deciding output strategies the underlying oligopoly structure is standard using a constant return to scale technology n firms produce homogeneous goods which are sold in a market characterized by constant price elasticity in this setup we assume that a fraction of firms employs a quite rough rule of thumb the so called local monopolistic approximation lma whereas the complementary fraction plays best reply br a more demanding strategy in terms of information and computation requirements the model is first considered with exogenously fixed fractions of firms in the two complementary groups then it is generalized by considering an endogenous evolutionary switching process between the two behavioral strategies based on profit driven replicator dynamics the role of the number of firms information costs and inertia or anchoring attitude in production decisions is analyzed as well as the influence in the evolutionary process of random noise in the demand function and memory of past profits global properties of the oligopoly with evolutionary pressure between behavioral rules are discussed with particular regard to cases in which the nash equilibrium is unstable

permit banking in emission trading competition arbitrage and linkage abstract several existing or proposed climate policies have considered bankable permits in a cap and trade c t program that covers beyond a single sector e g electric power or allows the program to link to external c t programs in other regions this paper develops a model of permit banking under imperfect competition and imperfect inter temporal arbitrage in which the firms in one dominant sector can exert market power in both product and permit markets while those in other sectors or linked programs are perfectly competitive a simple analytical model is developed to generate contestable hypothesis we further extend the model to account for the physical power system institutional rules and market conditions and then apply it to the pennsylvania jersey maryland pjm market we show that if the dominant firm has market power then the permit price rises at a higher rate than the discount rate contrary to perfectly competitive permit market where the permit price rises at the discount rate following the classic hotelling s rule furthermore under a declining emissions cap system with the permits front loaded in early time periods the dominant firm has an incentive to suppress the permit prices monopsony when buying the permits in early periods and then inflate the permit prices monopoly when selling them in later periods numerical results of the pjm case are consistent with the analytical conclusion

sraffa s system equal rate of profits and the notion of center of gravitation abstract this paper argues that the condition of uniform rate of profits in sraffa s system is not based on his implicit assumption that the system is at the equilibrium or the center of gravitation it is rather a logical requirement of a reproducing system of basic goods as long as prices are not imposed from outside the system this condition holds irrespective of supplies being equal to their respective effectual demands it conjectures that sraffa could have arrived at this conclusion through his analysis of the standard system on the basis of this result a critique of the received interpretation led by garegnani of sraffa s prices is developed

an industry equilibrium analysis of downstream vertical integration this paper investigates the effect of product substitutability on nash equilibrium distribution structures in a duopoly where each manufacturer distributes its goods through a single exclusive retailer which may be either a franchised outlet or a factory store static linear demand and cost functions are assumed and a number of rules about players expectations of competitors behavior are examined it is found that for most specifications product substitutability does influence the equilibrium distribution structure for low degrees of substitutability each manufacturer will distribute its product through a company store for more highly competitive goods manufacturers will be more likely to use a decentralized distribution system this article was originally published in marketing science volume 2 issue 2 pages 161 191 in 1983

retail contracting theory and practice we summarize a number of regularities that arise in the empirical literature on contractual relationships between manufacturers and their exclusive resellers we do this using studies of traditional and business format franchise relationships as well as studies of salesforce integration decisions some of the patterns that we uncover are consistent with a standard incentive cum insurance theory of organization while others are not we brie y review some theoretical extensions that seem promising in terms of reconciling seeming con icts between theory and practice i introduction manufacturers of retail products must decide whether to sell their products to consumers themselves vertical integration or to sell via independent retailers vertical separation when manufacturers do not perform the sales function internally but want exclusive retailers they usually choose some form of franchising 1 many theories attempt to explain the choice of retail organizational form moreover a considerable body of empirical evidence concerning this choice is accumulating we attempt to evaluate this econometric evidence and relate it to the theories to accomplish this task we assess studies of franchising arrangements as well as studies of sales force organization in industrial settings the paper is organized as follows in the next section we highlight a number of regularities that arise in the empirical literature on retail contracting in particular we nd that i risk is positively related to the use of high powered incentives vertical separation ii the importance of the agent s eiort in production is positively related to the use of high powered incentives

multiplicity of cournot equilibria and involuntary unemployment abstract in an overlapping generations model with cournot competition on the goods market it is shown that a continuum of stationary states and perfect foresight trajectories exists with unemployment at arbitrary low wages decisive for this is the influence that different forecast functions have on the objective demand curve even though they are consistent with perfect foresight with an example it is shown that simple adaptive and constant memory forecast rules generate such unemployment equilibria the corresponding temporary equilibrium dynamics may display stable unemployment and unstable full employment equilibria journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d43 d51 e24

the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games i theory the article presents information about the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games in this paper and its sequel presents study the existence of nash equilibrium in games where agents payoff functions are discontinuous the enquiry is motivated by a number of recent studies that have uncovered serious existence problems in seemingly innocuous economic games in the sequel to this paper authors have explained the utility function in the economic games referred to earlier are neither continuous nor quasi concave however they demonstrate that the payoff functions in mildly modified versions of these constructs exhibit two weaker forms of continuity which together with the requirement of quasi concavity suffice for the existence of an equilibrium from this one may conclude that at least in the modified versions of these models discontinuities in the payoff functions are not the real source of the problem rather it is the failure of the payoff functions to the quasi concave which is responsible for the non existence of equilibrium these observations bear on the existence of nash equilibrium in pure strategies

multi sector model of tradable emission permits this paper presents a multi sector model of tradable emission permits which includes oligopolistic and perfectly competitive industries the firms in oligopolistic industries are assumed to exercise market power in the tradable permit market as well as in the product market specifically we examine the effects of the initial permit allocation on the equilibrium outcomes focusing on the interaction among these product and permit markets it is shown that raising the number of initial permits allocated to one firm in an oligopolistic industry increases the output produced by that firm under certain conditions raising a clean less polluting firm s share of the initial permits can lead to reductions in both the product and permit prices we discuss criteria for the socially optimal allocation of initial permits considering the trade off between production inefficiency and consumer benefit

competition and waiting times in hospital markets this paper studies the impact of hospital competition on waiting times we use a salop type model with hospitals that differ in geographical locationand potentially waitingtime andtwotypesofpatients high benefitpatientswhochoosebetweenneighbouring hospitals competitive segment and low benefit patients who decide whether or not to demand treatment from the closest hospital monopoly segment compared with a benchmark case of monopoly we find that hospital competition leads to longer waiting times in equilibrium if the competitive segment is sufficiently large given a policy regime of hospital competition the effect of increased competition depends on the parameter of measurement lower travelling costs increase waiting times higher hospital density reduces waiting times while the effect of a larger competitive segment is ambiguous we also show that if the competitive segment is large hospital competition is socially preferable to monopoly only if the regulated treatment price is sufficiently high 2008 elsevier b v all rights reserved

how robust is the capital skill complementarity hypothesis this paper investigates the relation between substitution possibilities in manufacturing production between capital and two labor inputs blue collar and white collar workers griliches found in 1969 that unskilled labor was more easily substituted for by capital than skilled labor griliches called this capital skill complementarity the capital skill complementarity hypothesis has implications for the aggregation of labor inputs as well as for employment of labor categories and income distribution between factors this paper investigates the robustness of the capital skill complementarity hypothesis on swedish data by varying model assumptions concerning economies of scale and technological growth copyright 1992 by mit press

rejecting capital skill complementarity at all costs any serious empirical study of factor substitutability has to allow the data to display complementarity as well as substitutability the standard approach reflecting this idea is a translog specification this is also the approach used by numerous studies analyzing the relative capital skill complementarity hypothesis formulated by griliches 1969 according to this hypothesis the degree of substitutability between skilled labor and capital is lower than that for unskilled labor and capital yet the results of empirical studies investigating this hypothesis are controversial this paper offers a straightforward explanation using a translog approach reduces the issue of actor substitutability or complementarity to a question of cost shares our review of translog studies mentioned in hamermesh s 1993 summary on the demand for heterogeneous labor demonstrates that this argument is empirically relevant all these studies can be reconciled with each other on the basis of the cost share argument

on the rate of convergence of oligopoly equilibria in large markets an example abstract in this note we explore the rate of convergence of cournot nash equilibria with free entry and those with an entry deterring monopolist in a replicated market where the market demand functions is linear and firms face linear cost curves

diversification and competition financial intermediation in a large cournot walras economy abstract an economy with partially diversified imperfectly competitive cournot intermediaries is replicated the cournot walras equilibrium converges to the perfectly competitive equilibrium with no uncertainty despite the convergence the tension between diversification and competition persists when the economy becomes large and is manifested in the rates of convergence of price quantities and per capita welfare to their respective limits to maximize the rate of convergence of per capita welfare resources must be allocated in a particular way that balances the gains from better diversified intermediaries and the gains from more competition in the intermediation sector journal of economic literature classification numbers d43 d61 d89 g10 g21 l10 l16 o16

capital skill complementarity and inequality in sweden income inequality increased in sweden during the 1980s and 1990s as did the returns to higher education the main conclusion of this study is that increased income inequality between highand low skilled workers is demand driven and is due to the presence of capital skill complementarity in production increased investments in new more efficient capital equipment along with a slowdown in the growth rate of skilled labor have raised the ratio of effective capital inputs per skilled worker which in turn has increased the relative demand and market return for skilled labor through the capital skill complementarity mechanism

rationality of self and others in an economic system in this paper i want to disentangle some of the senses in which the hypothesis of rationality is used in economic theory in particular i want to stress that rationality is not a property of the individual alone although it is usually presented that way rather it gathers not only its force but also its very meaning from the social context in which it is embedded it is most plausible under very ideal conditions when these conditions cease to hold the rationality assumptions become strained and possibly even self contradictory they certainly imply an ability at information processing and calculation that is far beyond the feasible and that cannot well be justified as the result of learning and adaptation let me dismiss a point of view that is perhaps not always articulated but seems implicit in many writings it seems to be asserted that a theory of the economy must be based on rationality as a matter of principle otherwise there can be no theory this position has even been maintained by some who accept that economic behavior is not completely rational john stuart mill 1909 bk 2 ch 4 argued that custom not competition governs much of the economic world but he adds that the only possible theory is that standard economic doctrine makes assumptions of rationality that have very strong implications for the complexity of individuals decision processes the most complete assumptions of competitive general equilibrium theory require that all future and contingent prices exist and be known in fact of course not all these markets exist the incompleteness of markets has several side consequences for rationality for one thing each decision maker has to have a model that predicts the future spot prices this is an informational burden of an entirely different magnitude than simply optimizing at known prices it involves all the complexity of rational analysis of data and contradicts the much praised informational economy of the price system it is also the case that equilibria become much less well defined similar problems occur with imperfect competition this research was supported by the office of naval research grant onr n00014 79 c 0685 at the center for research in organizational efficiency institute for mathematical studies in the social sciences stanford university stanford california

educational policy in a credit constrained economy with skill heterogeneity an overlapping generations model where agents choose whether to become educated when young is presented education enhances productivity but needs to be financed by borrowing because of the possibility of default lenders may ration credit we characterize the steady state equilibrium with and without credit constraints and show that credit constraints are associated with lower education and a lower real interest rate we then study the role of public policy in remedying the inefficiency which occurs with credit market imperfections and examine whether public education can improve on the constrained equilibrium

a dynamic heterogeneous labour demand model for german manufacturing this paper presents an application of the generalised error correction model gecm for heterogeneous factor demands based on the quadratic cost function using data for 26 west german manufacturing industries over the period 1976 1995 it turns out that less general specifications such as the partial adjustment and the static ar 1 model are rejected furthermore both shortrun and long run labour demands of different skill classes are inelastic unskilled labour is found to have a somewhat higher wage elasticity in absolute terms than medium skilled labour a small part of shift in demand away from unskilled labour can be explained by the substitutability relationship between intermediate materials and unskilled labour between 6 and 13 percent of the observed shift towards high skilled labour can be explained by capital accumulation

an economic theory of vertical restraints vertical restraints imposed by manufacturers on the prices locations and sales of retail firms represent a puzzling departure from the simple price mediated exchange of conventional markets in this article we analyze the theoretical basis for these restraints in a setting where retailers inform consumers and are imperfectly competitive and where a manufacturer has some monopoly power we identify three potential externalities affecting retailers decisions these externalities lead to the failure of simple uniform price contracts to coordinate the incentives of retailers with the objective of maximizing combined manufacturer and retailer profits we identify the packages of vertical restraints that are minimally sufficient under various conditions to neutralize the externalities and to achieve the joint profit maximum

a model of imperfect competition with keynesian features the recent literature on the reappraisal of keynes has viewed keynesian equilibria as arising when prices are fixed and effective demands and supplies are equilibrated through the adjustment of quantities one problem with this approach is that it lacks a theory of price determination in particular of why prices are fixed in the present paper we show that a number of keynesian features arise in a model in which prices are fully flexible but where agents have some monopoly power one advantage of this approach is that it provides a theory of the determination of both prices and quantities

general equilibrium concepts under imperfect competition a cournotian approach in a pure exchange economy we propose a general equilibrium concept under imperfect competition the cournotian monopolistic competition equilibrium and compare it to the cournot walras and the monopolistic competition concepts the advantage of the proposed concept is to require less computational ability from the agents the comparison is made first through a simple example then through a mon abstract concept the p equilibrium based on a general notion of price coordination c 1997 academic press

monopolistic competition in a large economy with differentiated commodities a correction in hart 1979 a model of monopolistic competition in a large economy with differentiated commodities was developed in this model firms had a choice whether to set up or not one feature of the model was that free entry of firms was not assumed barriers to entry were captured by assuming that there was a large generally infinite set of potential firms f corresponding to each f f there was a firm called firm f with a production set y f each firm had a set up cost associated with it only very weak conditions were placed on the set f and the production set mapping y so that in particular the case where different firms could produce a commodity on different terms was allowed for the economy was made large by replicating the consumer sector keeping the production sector i e the set of potential firms f fixed the number of operating firms in equilibrium generally increased however since in view of the set up costs there was room for more firms in a large economy unfortunately it turns out that this procedure while correct does not capture quite what was intended in particular while in the resulting monopolistically competitive equlibrium some firms will earn supernormal profits it can be shown that for any 0 the per capita number of firms earning profits in excess of tends to zero as the size of the consumer sector tends to infinity see corollary 6 in the appendix to hart 1979 in other words in per capita terms almost all firms earn approximately zero profits in a large economy thus while barriers to entry may be significant in absolute terms in per capita terms they are negligible the way round this difficulty is to drop the assumption that the set of potential firms is fixed instead substitute the assumption that the set of potential firms in the economy re where the consumer sector is replicated r times is given bywhere f is as before that is one replicates the set of potential firms at the same time as the consumer sector then the theorems of hart 1979 continue to hold corollary 6 in the appendix must be modified as follows corollary 6 there exists h 0 such thatfor all f f corollary 6 is proved below otherwise the proofs of theorem 1 and proposition 2 are unchanged one no longer sets h 1 after corollary 6 as an example f might consist of one firm with an efficient technology for producing some commodity and one firm with an inefficient technology then in the economy re there will be r potential firms with the efficient technology and r potential firms with the inefficient technology it is easy to construct cases where both types of firms operate in the monopolistically competitive equilibrium in re and the efficient firms earn supernormal profits which are bounded away from zero as r thus barriers to entry which are significant in per capita terms are now allowed for a justification for replicating f along with the consumer sector can be given in the above example the efficient firms may owe their superior technology to the fact that they are situated on good land say of which there is a scarcity thus the supernormal profits are just rents on the land when one replicates the economy it is natural to replicate the scarce land and hence the number of firms which are situated on it so as to keep everything constant except for scale note finally that it may be possible to generalize the analysis to the case where the set of potential firms in the economy re is given by rf where 1f 2f are exogenously specified sets and rf is not necessarily the r fold union of some set f we have not investigated this however proof of corollary 6 suppose not then for each h 0 we can find f f with by lemma 5 2 r f h for all r some r but in re there are r firms identical to firm f and so each of these firms makes profit in excess of h in the monopolistically competitive equilibrium when r r hence total per capita profits of all firms exceed h in equilibrium when r r it follows that letting h we can find a subsequence of the economies re such that total per capita profits tend to infinity along the subsequence however applying corollary 4 and an argument similar to that in a 30 a 32 we see that arp a dry1 a is bounded hence so are per capita profits arp a dry1 a ry0 contradiction

endogenous fluctuations under evolutionary pressure in cournot competition abstract an evolutionary game theoretic model of cournot competition is investigated individuals choose from a finite set of different behavioral rules each rule specifies the quantity to be produced in the current period as a function of past quantities using more sophisticated rules may require extra information costs based upon realized payoffs the fractions of the population choosing a certain behavioral rule are updated according to the replicator equation with noise the long run behavior of the evolutionary system consisting of the population dynamics coupled with the quantity dynamics of the cournot game may be complicated and endogenous fluctuations may arise we consider a typical example where firms can choose between two rules the nash rule and the best reply rule we show that a homoclinic tangency between the stable and unstable manifold of the equilibrium occurs as evolutionary pressure increases implying bifurcation routes to complicated dynamics and strange attractors

cournot equilibrium with free entry the case of decreasing average cost functions this paper investigates in the context of a market for a homogeneous commodity the asymptotic properties of cournot equilibria with free entry when the size of the market increases indefinitely the analysis focuses on the case where the average cost function is always decreasing and the marginal cost function is non decreasing for all sufficiently large outputs

public sector employment and the skill premium sweden versus the united states 1970 2012 swedish census data and tax records reveal an astonishing decline in the aggregate skill premium of 30 percent between 1970 and 1990 with only a modest recovery in the next couple of decades in contrast the us skill premium rose by around 24 percent over those four decades a theory that equalizes wages with marginal products can rationalize these disparate outcomes when we replace commonly used measures of total labor supplies by private sector employment the dramatic decline in the skill premium in sweden is the result of an expanding public sector that has disproportionately hired unskilled labor

walrasian equilibria as limits of noncooperative equilibria part ii pure strategies abstract we examine the connection between walrasian equilibria of a limit economy with infinitesimal firms and noncooperative cournot equilibria of approximating finite economies with significant firms nonconvex production sets decreasing returns in the aggregate and endogenous determination of the number of active firms are allowed a walrasian equilibrium is a limit of pure strategy noncooperative equilibria only if a condition loosely analogous to downward sloping demand in the partial equilibrium constant returns to scale case holds the condition is also sufficient to guarantee the existence of a robust sequence of pure strategy noncooperative equilibria which converges to the walrasian equilibrium

the dynamics of competition a restoration of the classical analysis the main purpose of this article is to show that it is possible to construct a model of competition based on the classical perspective smith ricardo and marx an analysis of the work of the classics is presented and their views of the workings of competition is contrasted with neoclassical and keynesian approaches a simple model with two commodities is constructed in which the stability of the classical long term equilibrium is shown under certain conditions this first model is developed to include the treatments of gravitation rationing deficiency in demand choice of the technology and three commodities copyright 1987 by oxford university press

locally consistent oligopolistic equilibria are cournot walras equilibria abstract a kth order locally consistent equilibrium is an imperfectly competitive general equilibrium point at which firms only perceive at kth order taylor expansion of their true demand curves it is shown that the set of kth order locally consistent equilibrium strategies coincides with the set of cournot walras equilibria as soon as k 1 under simple regularity conditions

equilibrium selection in a nonlinear duopoly game with adaptive expectations abstract we analyze a nonlinear discrete time cournot duopoly game where players have adaptive expectations the evolution of expected outputs over time is generated by the iteration of a noninvertible two dimensional map the long run behavior is characterized by multistability that is the presence of coexisting stable consistent beliefs which correspond to nash equilibria in the quantity space hence a problem of equilibrium selection arises and the long run outcome strongly depends on the choice of the players initial beliefs we analyze the basins of attraction and their qualitative changes as the model parameters vary we illustrate that the basins might be nonconnected sets and reveal the mechanism which is responsible for this often neglected kind of complexity the analysis of the global bifurcations which cause qualitative changes in the topological structure of the basins is carried out by the method of critical curves

the dampening of competition effect of exclusive dealing using the dampening of competition approach to understanding vertical relationships this paper shows that in the absence of intrabrand retailer competition firms earn greater profits using exclusive dealing the paper explains the frequent simultaneous appearance of exclusive dealing and exclusive territoriality the results are used to analyze the famous 1949 standard stations case the author concludes that the 1949 court did the right thing for a wrong reason copyright 1990 by blackwell publishing ltd

competing vertical structures precommitment and renegotiation we consider a model where two agents privately informed about their own characteristics play a normal form game on behalf of two uninformed principals we analyze the existence of precommitment effects through public announcements of contracts in a model where agency contracts designed ex ante can always be secretly renegotiated at the ex ante and interim stages we show that the existence of precommitment effects depends both on the strategic complementarity of the agents actions and on the direct effect of the opponents actions on each principal s welfare in our model the possibility of renegotiation is crucial for the existence of precommitment effects the results are introduced through an example of cournot and bertrand competition between firms viewed as vertical structures