In industries where consumers can assemble their own systems, firms must decide whether to make their components compatible with those of their rivals. We examine a two-stage game in which two fully integrated firms make their compatibility decisions before competing in prices. The symmetric...

This article summarizes the patterns of firm entry, growth, and exit in the four-digit U.S. manufacturing industries over the period 1963-1982. Entrants are disaggregated into new firms, existing firms that diversify into an industry by opening new production facilities, and existing firms that...

A firm in a duopolistic market in which there is incomplete information about cost may benefit from having less precise prior information than its competitor. Experience in production provides firms with internally generated private signals about cost. As a result, the marginal return to...

This article examines the incentives of firms competing in an oligopolistic industry to share information about an unknown demand parameter when such sharing takes place on a quid pro quo basis. The model predicts that if total cost functions are sufficiently convex, information sharing (such as...

We analyze an overlapping-generations model of duopolistic competition in the presence of consumer switching costs. Competition for established buyers is continually intermingled with competition for new, uncommitted buyers. In equilibrium the firm with attached customers typically specializes...

We use a two-equation system to estimate the effects of joint bidding on the number of bids and the maximum bid the government received in auctions for Offshore Continental Shelf tracts held between 1979 and 1983. The estimates are corrected for selection bias and simultaneity. We find that...

In June 1977, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced priorities for those projects to be executed during subsequent fiscal years. I use conditional logit techniques to analyze random orderings to estimate the Commission's preference functions among projects. I show that the...