Competition with product rivalry is examined in a model where products are differentiated by both quality and brand name. With no commitment, firms produce a full product line. When firms can commit to restrict their product offerings, firms specialize if the degree of brand-specific...

This paper presents a simple model of compatibility and bundling in industries where consumers assemble several necessary components into a system that is close to their ideal. The authors show that, for a wide range of parameters, firms will choose to produce compatible components but will...

In many industries, consumers combine several components to build their own "system." This paper analyzes the incentives to standardize among firms selling a single component to consumers who have already acquired the rest of the system. By selling a component that can work with different...

I analyze the effects of competition on process innovation and product introduction and obtain robust results that hold for a range of market structures and competition modes. It is found that increasing the number of firms tends to decrease cost reduction expenditure per firm, whereas...

The authors consider the implications of game-theoretic models for the competitive or collusive nature of basing point pricing. In one-shot games, equilibrium price schedules do not generally conform to basing point pricing with unrestricted price competition. Nevertheless, basing point pricing...