The emergence of powerful, big box retailers such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot has enhanced the interest among both academics and non-academics in the effects of countervailing power. One of the major concerns expressed by some commentators is that rising countervailing power will lead to poorer...

Cournot oligopoly has been studied almost exclusively under the implicit assumption of perfectly competitive factor markets. However,oligopolistic firms procure often factors of production from imperfectly competitive markets. Okuguchi(1998,2000) has analyzed Cournot oligopoly under the...

Two-period Cournot competition between n identical firms producing at constant marginal cost and able to store before selling has pure strategy Nash- perfect equilibria, in which some firms store to exert endogenously a leader- ship over rivals. The number of firms storing balances market share...

This paper shows that, unlike what has been found in other papers, a hydro reservoir is an effective tool to exercise market power. Its appealing as a tool is enhanced by the fact that there is no need to constrain total hydro production - a practice too easy to detect -; it suffices to distort...

We derive a measure of firm speed of price adjustment that is directly inversely related to market power and compare this to the measure derived by Martin (1993). However, both measures are incorrect when firms have price conjectural variations. This is because Taylor expansions of the demand...

We introduce capacity constrained competition between market-making intermediaries in a model in which agents can choose between trading with intermediaries, joining a search market or remaining inactive. Recently, market-making by a monopolistic intermediary has been analyzed by Rust and Hall...

There are a lot of goods which have network externalities. While the number of players who have such a good is small, they may not get enough utility from the goods. That is, players have an incentive to delay their decision, when they purchase the goods with network externalities. Delay causes...

We show that the standard analysis of vertical relationships transposes directly to investment timing. Thus, when a firm undertaking a project requires an outside supplier (e.g. an equipment manufacturer) to provide it with a discrete input, and if the supplier has market power, investment...

We model investments in capacity in a homogeneous product duopoly facing uncertain demand growth. Capacity building is achieved through adding production units that are durable and lumpy and whose cost is irreversible. There is no exogenous order of moves, no first-mover or second-mover...

Collusion sustainability depends on firms’ aptitude to impose sufficiently severe punishments in case of deviation from the collusive rule. We characterize the ability of oligopolistic firms to implement a collusive strategy when their ability to punish deviations over one or several periods...