In several industries downstream competitors form upstream partnerships. An important rationale is that higher aggregate upstream volume might generate efficiencies that reduce both fixed and marginal costs. Our focus is on the latter. We show that if upstream marginal costs are decreasing in...

We study the dynamics of competition in a model with network effects, an incumbent and entry. We propose a new way of representing the strategic advantages of incumbency in a static model. We then embed this static analysis in a dynamic framework with heterogeneous consumers. We completely...