This paper provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a pure strategy Bertrand equilibrium in a model of price competition with fixed costs. It unveils an interesting and unexplored relationship between Bertrand competition and natural monopoly. That relationship points...

We analyze Bertrand's price competition in a homogenous good market with a fixed cost and an increasing marginal cost (i.e., with variable returns to scale). If the fixed cost is avoidable, we show that the non-subadditivity of the cost function at the output corresponding to the oligopoly...

This paper is about a model of Bertrand competition in a homogeneous-good market with free entry of identical firms and variable returns to scale. If the optimum number of active firms in the market is two or more, and the number of active firms is equal to that optimum number, then Bertrand...

This paper reformulates a model used by Buchanan and Yoon to formalize the economic problems associated to the so-called "tragedy of the commons" and "tragedy of the anticommons". In doing so we identify two different efficiency problems, due to externalities (common property) and market power....

We present a two-firm model of predation under complete information, based on different discount factors, and integrate it with a model of collusion. Competition, collusion and predation are seen as alternative strategies. The basic conclusions are that there is predation when one firm has a...