Choosing price or quantity? The role of delegation and network externalities

We consider a differentiated duopoly and endogenise the firm choice of the strategy variable (price or quantity) to play on the product market in the presence of network externalities. We model this choice by assuming both competition between entrepreneurial (owner-managed) firms and competition between managerial firms in which market decisions are delegated from owners to revenue-concerned managers. While network externalities are shown not to alter the symmetric equilibrium quantity choice arising in the no-delegation case, sufficiently strong network effects allow us to eliminate the multiplicity of equilibria under delegation and lead to a unique equilibrium in which both firms choose price.     

Competing cybermediaries

We examine a price competition game between two intermediaries offering to match two sides of a market on the Internet. Competition is characterized by asymmetric network externalities. We account for some specificities of cybermediation, in particular access versus usage pricing and the possibility of using the services of several intermediaries. When only registration fees are used and agents register with at most one cybermediary, there exists an equilibrium where one firm corners the market with positive profits. Introducing either fees contingent on successful matching or the possibility of registration with two cybermediaries make these profits vanish. Other types of equilibria are discussed.     

Price competition in a differentiated products duopoly under network effects

We examine price competition under product-specific network effects, in a duopoly where the products are differentiated both horizontally and vertically. We emphasize the role of consumers’ expectations formation. When expectations are not influenced by prices, the market may be shared but shares must be equal unless product qualities differ or one firm, possibly even the low-quality one, may capture the entire market. When expectations are influenced by prices, which would be the case when there is commitment, competition becomes more intense and the high-quality firm tends to capture a larger market share. Under strong network effects there is a continuum of equilibria and the higher the prices, the smaller the difference between those prices can be. Requiring continuity of expectations, however, delivers a unique equilibrium where one firm captures the entire market.     

International Commodity Taxation under Monopolistic Competition

We analyze non‐cooperative commodity taxation in a two‐country trade model characterized by monopolistic competition and international firm and capital mobility. In this setting, taxes in one country affect foreign welfare through the relocation of mobile firms and through changes in the rents accruing to capital owners. With consumption‐based taxation, these fiscal externalities exactly offset each other and the non‐cooperative tax equilibrium is Pareto efficient. With production‐based taxation, however, there are additional externalities on the foreign tax base and the foreign price level that lead non‐cooperative tax rates to exceed their Pareto efficient levels.     

COMPETITION FOR MARKET SHARE OR FOR MARKET SIZE: OLIGOPOLISTIC EQUILIBRIA WITH VARYING COMPETITIVE TOUGHNESS*

For an industry producing a composite commodity, we propose a comprehensive concept of oligopolistic equilibrium, allowing for a parameterized continuum of regimes varying in competitive toughness. Each firm sets simultaneously its price and its quantity under two constraints, relative to its market share and to market size. The price and the quantity equilibrium outcomes always belong to the set of oligopolistic equilibria. When firms are identical and we let their number increase, any sequence of symmetric oligopolistic equilibria converges to the monopolistic competition outcome. Further results are derived in the symmetric CES case, concerning in particular the collusive solution enforceability.     

STRATEGIC R&D AND NETWORK COMPATIBILITY

We analyse the effects of network externalities in strategic R&D competition. We present a model of two firms competing with R&D investments and prices in a differentiated consumer market. Buyers form firm-specific networks which can be compatible. A high degree of compatibility and large spillovers moderate price competition due to weak strategic value of firm-specific networks and R&D investments, respectively. Asymmetry in product qualities brings out network effects that cancel out in conventional symmetric settings. The lower quality firm increases R&D and decreases its price as spillovers or network compatibility is increased. This happens when R&D and firm-specific network size have high strategic value.     

Strategic Consumption Complementarities: Can Price Flexibility Eliminate Inefficiencies and Instability?

Generally, two facts occur with strategic complementarities and fixed prices: (i) the equilibria are multiple and (ii) if the complementarities are strong, the law of demand is violated and the equilibrium is unstable. In this paper, we analyse the effect of price flexibility on these features as well as on market welfare properties. Assuming an exchange economy with H agents consuming two goods with one strategic complement, we show that flexibility of prices may remove both the multiplicity of the equilibria and the instability of behavior when the externalities are strong. Moreover, we find conditions to correct instability when it is caused by perverse wealth effects. When preferences are quasilinear and identical, if the externality is beneficial, any equilibrium is Pareto optimal despite the externality. But if the externality is detrimental, corrections are required.     

Stakeholders’ relationships and product market competition

In this article, we study the relationships between main stakeholders (shareholders, consumers and employees) when firms are consumer oriented (CO) in the sense of caring about consumers’ interests in the objective function. We let these firms first bargain with labour union over their employees’ wages and then compete either in the quantity space (Cournot competition) or in the price space (Bertrand competition). Our model shows that taking care of the consumers’ interests when determining product market strategies may reverse the traditional ranking between Cournot and Bertrand equilibria. This implies that if shareholders in a CO firm can choose either a quantity or a price strategy, they will surprisingly choose the latter. Moreover, we show that the conflicting interests between main stakeholders are attenuated under Bertrand competition compared to Cournot competition.     

Product Emulation Strategies in The Presence of Reputation Effects And Network Externalities: Some Evidence From The Minicomputer Industry

A model of firm performance in the minicomputer industry is developed and estimated. We use an hedonic price formulation to analyze product design and pricing issues and a market share model to assess the demand effects of price-performance characteristics, installed base advantages and manufacturer reputation. The results, which are based on 1976–1983 data, demonstrate the importance of network externalities, price-performance competition and reputation. We utilize the estimated models to quantify the implications of several emulation strategies and several defensive strategies of incumbent manufacturers.     

ENTRANTS' REPUTATION AND INDUSTRY DYNAMICS

This article analyzes entry–exit decisions in a market where reputation determines the price that firms may charge, within a rational‐expectation model of competition in a nonatomic market under heterogeneous reputations. The analysis focuses on the class of name‐switching reputational equilibria, in which a firm discards its name if and only if its reputation falls below the entrants' reputation. The main technical result is the existence of a unique steady‐state equilibrium within this class, in which the entrants' reputation is endogenous. The resulting industry dynamics is largely on agreement with the findings in the empirical literature.     

Private ownership economies with externalities and existence of competitive equilibria: a differentiable approach

We consider a general equilibrium model of a private ownership economy with consumption and production externalities. Utility functions and production technologies may be affected by the consumption and production activities of all other agents in the economy. We use homotopy techniques to show that the set of competitive equilibria is non-empty and compact. Fixing the externalities, the assumptions on utility functions and production technologies are standard in a differentiable framework. Competitive equilibria are written in terms of first order conditions associated with agents’ behavior and market clearing conditions, following the seminal paper of Smale (J Math Econ 1:1–14, 1974). The work of adapting the homotopy approach to economies with externalities on the production side is non-trivial and it requires some ingenious adjustments, because the production technologies are not required to be convex with respect to the consumption and production activities of all agents.     

Antidumping Regulations: Anti‐Competitive and Anti‐Export

In a Bertrand duopoly model, it is shown that an antidumping regulation can be strategically exploited by the home firm to reduce the degree of competition in the home market. The home firm commits not to export to the foreign market which gives the foreign firm a monopoly in its own market. As a result the foreign firm will increase its price allowing the home firm to increase its price and its profits. If the products are sufficiently close substitutes then the higher profits in the home market are large enough to compensate for the loss of profits on exports.     

A Two-stage Price-setting Duopoly: Bertrand or Stackelberg

This paper investigates a two-stage price-setting duopoly with differentiated goods. First, each firm announces its price; second, it chooses its actual price; and finally the market opens. Once a firm announces a price, it is able to discount it but not raise it. The model includes Stackelberg-type and Bertrand-type equilibria as possible outcomes. Whether Bertrand or Stackelberg appears in equilibrium depends on the properties of demand functions crucially. We find three patterns of equilibrium outcomes; one case has Bertrand equilibrium only, another has Stackelberg only, and the other has both equilibria     

Heterogeneity vs. externalities in technological competition: A tale of possible technological landscapes

The article presents a stochastic interaction model based on Gibbs random fields to analyze technological competition in a population of heterogeneous adopters with local or global externalities. The relationships between both heterogeneity and externalities and imperfect and asymmetric information are first emphasized. When local externalities and heterogeneity coexist, the technological landscapes of the industry are then shown to depend on the relative influence of these two parameters, with a phase transition: technologies coexist either in approximately equal market shares when heterogeneity is high enough or with one of the technologies only surviving in technological niches when local externalities dominate. Niches do also spontaneously appear: technological options survive in economic space due to the existence of some amount of heterogeneity among agents. On the contrary, when global externalities are added, pure standardization almost always occurs. We finally argue that different public policies should be designed so as to fit with different technological landscapes.     

Product differentiation and welfare: Comment

In general it may be argued that the monopolistically competitive industry is not consistent as viewed from the game-theoretic point of view, and it ignores the strategic aspects of competition. This comment points out specifically how the welfare implications derived from a Nash equilibrium model in which the goods are imperfectly substitutes used by Spence in many articles are incorrect. The total quantities offered by firms at Nash equilibria within this model and those of the market demand curve at the same price levels are not equal. All emanate from the misspecification of the price equation with substitutable goods by Spence which is not appropriate for the Nash equilibria model with many firms. Moreover, some other very important papers of Spence which follow are critisized for the same mathematical contradiction.     

展览产品定价模型及价格影响因素研究——基于双边市场理论视角

本文借鉴近年来兴起的双边市场理论对展览产品的定价模型及影响因素进行了理论研究。本文指出，展览市场是典型的双边市场，具有明显的网络外部性。本文通过建立垄断和竞争两种模型研究了展览产品的定价，并指出参展商和观众的需求价格弹性、一方消费者给另一方消费者带来的网络外部性、展览市场的竞争以及产品差异化都是影响展览产品定价的主要因素。     

Multiple equilibria in a growth model with monopolistic competition

Summary The standard neoclassical growth model is modified by introducing a market structure characterized by monopolistic competition and variable demand elasticities. In equilibrium, the price elasticity of the demand schedule facing a typical firm is a function of the aggregate savings rate. The latter feature results from an assumed wedge between the elasticity of substitution across goods in productive activities and that in consumption. In contrast with most examples in the literature our model does not require increasing returns (internal or external) in order to generate multiple equilibria.Thanks are due to Jess Benhabib, Duncan Foley, Oded Galor and participants in seminars at the Econometric Society Summer Meetings (Boston, 1993), NBER 1993 Summer Institute, CORE, UAB, and European University Institute for helpful comments.     

Human capital externalities with monopsonistic competition

This paper provides a novel microeconomic foundation for pecuniary human capital externalities in a labor market model of monopsonistic competition. Multiple equilibria arise because of a strategic complementarity in investment decisions.     

Small Leading Firms*

We formally analyze the question of whether a price leader must control a large share of the market. Our main result is that if other producers have rising marginal costs and behave as price takers, even the smallest firm in a competitive industry with a rising supply curve can enhance its profits by cutting output and raising price, becoming a price leader. Therefore, we would expect pure competition to be destroyed under these technological conditions.     

ENTRY AND QUALITY SIGNALLING WHEN ONLY SOME CONSUMERS ARE INFORMED OF THE ENTRANT'S QUALITY

This paper focuses on competition between an incumbent and an entrant when only the entrant's quality is unknown to (some) consumers. The incumbent may or may not know the entrant's quality. The model reveals a separating equilibrium where the entrant's high price signals its high quality when the proportion of informed consumers is at some intermediate value. The case in which the incumbent knows the entrant's quality generates two additional equilibria. When the proportion of informed consumers is large enough, firms choose their prices as in the complete information case. The entrant's high price in combination with the incumbent's low price signals the entrant's high quality. When the proportion of informed consumers is at some intermediate value, the incumbent's high price signals the entrant's low quality, while its low price signals the entrant's high quality. Interestingly, we find that entry may be facilitated with informational product differentiation.