Multi-period Competition with Switching Costs: An Overlapping Generations Formulation.

The author examines an infinite-period duopoly market with positive consumer switching costs and overlapping generations of consumers. When consumers have a finite time-horizon, then, unlike A. Beggs and R. Klemperer (1992), the two firms may alternate dominance from one period to the next, alternately charging high and low prices. This agrees with the intuition that firms with a high locked-in market share may set price so as to exploit that market share, which causes a subsequent low market share among the new cohort of buyers, leading to lower prices, etc. Copyright 1996 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.