Location and Pricing Decisions of a MultiStore Monopoly in a Spatial Market

This article presents an analysis of location and pricing decisions of a monopolist about to open several stores in a compact geographical space. The number of stores is made endogenous by the introduction of fixed costs. A novel methodology is developed, by which the firm's location and price decisions are represented as continuous functions defined over the geographical space. This modeling artifact generates a negligible error but simplifies the solution considerably and allows the derivation of several intuitive results. Although the focus is on one-dimensional markets, it is shown that the method can easily be adapted to two-dimensional markets. Copyright Blackwell Publishers, 2004