Consider an oligopolistic industry where demand uncertainty resolves after at least one firm has engaged in production. Those firms who produce first behave as simultaneous leaders (co-leaders), whilst those who produce after demand becomes observable will be followers. Each follower simply...

This paper shows an endogenous Stackelberg leader-follower relation that stems purely from commitment, not from chronological order of entry. We consider a symmetric duopoly game with a priori demand uncertainty which resolves after a short term. In the beginning, each supplier is allowed to...

This paper shows the possibility that, under certain conditions, it can be socially optimal for the public firm not to privatise its whole production capacity but to retain a part of it, even when private operation of the production facilities is strictly more cost-efficient than public operation.

We characterise the interplay between oligopolistic firms' strategic decisions in product development, and their incentives for (or against) merger. In an R&D intensive industry where newly developed products can be awarded exclusive patent protection, individual firms' profit maximisation can...

We characterize the interplay between firm's decisions in product development, be it joint or independent, and their ensuing repeated price behaviour, either collusive or Bertrand-Nash. We prove that joint-product development and the resulting lack of horizontal differentiation may destabilise...

Advance production served as a means of quantity commitment. This paper shows that the pre-emption acts as strategic substitutes between oligopolists. We also show that a firm's incentive for advance production arises only if it has a quantity-setting opponent, irrespective of the firm's own...

This is a preliminary version of a chapter of a prospective book which springs from concerted effort among several researchers in the field of industrial economics. This chapter is devoted to recent development in research on strategic investment. We start with a brief overview on the past...

In an oligopoly supergame, firms' actions in prices and quantities are subject to non-negativity constraints. These constraints can obstruct the practicability of optimal punishment (a la Abreu (1986), Lambson (1987), and Hackner (1996)) in sustaining tacit collusion. Noting that the prospect of...

In an oligopoly supergame, firms face an obvious technological constraint: the positivity of their production quantities. WE show that Lambson's (1987) result on "security-level punishment", that the single-period punishment makes the firm's discounted participation condition just bind, holds...