Technology choice under duopoly

This paper presents a conjectural variation approach to demonstrate that competing firms will often distort their cost structures away from strict cost minimization for strategic reasons. In particular, it is shown that the nature of the desired distortions of production technology depends critically on the magnitudes of the firms' conjectural variations with respect to outputs as well as the firms' conjectural variations with respect to technology. These results are in sharp contrast to the conventional wisdom based on monopolized or perfectly competitive markets.