1,720,968 research outputs found
How to Compete? Cournot versus Bertrand in a Vertical Structure with an Integrated Input Supplier
No full textWe study whether a quantity or a price contract is chosen at equilibrium by one integrated firm and its retail competitor in a differentiated duopoly. Using a similar vertical structure, Arya et al. (2008) show that Bertrand competition is more profitable than Cournot competition, which contrasts with conventional wisdom. In this article, we first demonstrate that such a result is robust to the endogenous determination of the type of contract. Second, by introducing managerial incentives in the model, we find that delegation to managers may lead each firm to choose a quantity contract and, as long as products are sufficiently differentiated, entails conflicting choices causing nonexistence of equilibrium in pure strategies. Significantly high product substitutability reconciles firms’ objectives under delegation, leading unique or multiple equilibria with symmetric types of contracts to arise
Optimal manipulation rules in a mixed oligopoly
No full textWe study the optimal manipulation rules of a public firm’s objective function in a mixed oligopoly with imperfect product substitutability. We start with a baseline duopoly model and compare the solutions under quantity and price competition, and the way they are affected by product substitutability. This allows us to show that partial privatization, strategic delegation and other specific government’s commitments on the objective function of the public management can be looked at as special cases of these optimal rules, and to evaluate the viability of these policies under the two modes of competition. In this framework, we also discuss the equivalence between manipulation of the objective function and Stackelberg leadership. Since optimal manipulation rules change as new dimensions are added, we also derive the optimal rules under oligopoly, quadratic costs, and competition of international firms. This fairly general unified framework allows to discuss the impact of these factors on the government’s implementation policies of the optimal manipulation rules
Symmetric and Asymmetric Equilibria in a Spatial Duopoly
Full text linkWe describe a spatial duopoly in a Hotelling model with quadratic transportation costs where consumers are distributed according to a symmetric density whose degree of concentration is variable. By solving the two-stage game in prices and locations as a function of the concentration index, we analyse the effects on the firms’optimal choices in a unbounded strategy space of an increasing agglomeration of consumers in the middle. Traditional horizontal differentiation-locational models assume that consumers are uniformly distributed over the characteristics space. With a few exceptions, the situations in which the consumers' preferences are concentrated on a subsection of the available varieties have been neglected. This issue was successfully addressed by Tabuchi and Thisse (1995), who explicitly solved the price-location problem for two firms in the presence of a symmetric triangular consumers’ distribution. They showed that in this case any symmetric location cannot be an equilibrium, due to a discontinuity of the reactions functions generated by the non-differentiability of the consumers’ density at its modal value; rather, their model exhibits two subgame perfect asymmetric equilibria characterised by strong product differentiation. In this paper, we assume that consumers are distributed according to a trapezoid distribution. This allows a simple parametrization of the degree of consumers' concentration, which includes the uniform and the triangular distribution as limit cases, and makes possible to solve the price-location problem as a function of the concentration index. Therefore we are able to find a more general explicit solution which covers those previously discussed in the literature. The basic results of the paper are the following. A symmetric equilibrium exists for all values of the concentration parameter, provided that the density is differentiable at the centre of its support. A higher degree of the consumers’ concentration around the middle induces firms to move inwards, in order to locate closer to the growing share of consumers: competition in the highly populated central area of the market reduces differentiation and strengthens price competition. The overall equilibrium shows clearly that the demand effect outweighs the strategic effect. However the symmetric equilibrium may be not unique. When concentration becomes sufficiently high, two asymmetric specular equilibria coexist with the symmetric one. They arise for a degree of concentration lower than that implied by a triangular distribution, with price-location choices collapsing in the limit to those identified by Tabuchi and Thisse. At these equilibria one firm locates in the central area of the market, while the other locates outside the market space. These results are consistent with the idea that a higher concentration of consumers around the centre induces firms to reduce the optimal product differentiation and offer theoretical support to the intuition that homogeneity of consumers might have important implications in terms of reducing the firms' market power. However, our findings suggest that in models of spatial competition realistic representations of the demand side may generate a ‘strange’ interplay between the strategic effect and the demand effect which may cause a failure of the uniqueness property and weakens the economic interpretation of equilibria.
Patent Licensing in Models of Spatial Competition: a Literature Review
No full textWe survey the main theoretical contributions on patent licensing in spatial models of competition. Building on both the shopping models à la Hotelling and the shipping models of spatial discrimination, our analysis focuses on how the spatial dimension of competition drives the choice of the optimal licensing contract by an innovating firm. The work also sheds light on some features determining the optimal technology transfer method in a spatial context, which allows us to better position patent licensing in the debate on technology transfer
Managerial Incentives and Stackelberg Equilibria in Oligopoly
Full text linkThe paper investigates both quantity and price oligopoly games in markets with a variable number of managerial and entrepreneurial firms which defines market structure. Following Vickers (Economic Journal, 1985) which establishes an equivalence between the equilibrium under unilateral delegation and the Stackelberg quantity equilibrium, the outcomes of these games are compared with the ones in sequential multi-leaders and multi-followers games. The profitability of a managerial/entrepreneurial attitude vs leadership/followership is shown to critically depend upon the kind of strategy, price or quantity, and upon the assumed market structure. Indeed, the latter turns out to be crucial in determining the equivalence result that is shown to be contingent on the assumption that just one leader or one managerial firm operate in the market. A welfare analysis finally highlights the differences between the delegation and the sequential games, focusing on the impact of market structure and imperfect substitutability on the equilibria of the two games.Strategic delegation, sequential games, quantity and price competition, welfare analysis.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Spatial Discrimination, Product Substitutability and Welfare
No full textThe paper examines a quantity-location duopoly game in a spatial discrimination model in which the delivered goods are assumed to be imperfect substitutes or complements. By extending the range of the unit transportation cost analyzed in the existing literature, it is shown that a dispersed equilibrium arises in which the choice of the optimal locations is affected by the degree of product substitutability. The interaction between the latter and the size of the transportation cost is also discussed in order to verify its welfare implications. In particular, it is shown that in this spatial framework imperfect substitutability may increase welfare.
Codice Scopus: 2-s2.0-7995885947
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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