This paper explores how costly price adjustment and strategic interaction may cause a leader-follower configuration to arise. While most imperfect models predict that price-setters will synchronize their moves, we show that leadership generates stable staggering.

This paper shows that the adoption of flexible manufacturing techniques by firms leads to a tougher price regime. This need not benefit consumers since the tougher regime deters entry and facilitates segmented market structures.

This paper shows that if domestic firms do not have identical unit costs, then the interplay between the Herfindahl index of concentration and the elasticity of the slope of the demand curve is of major importance in the determination of optimal trade policies. When the demand curve is concave,...

This paper considers an incumbent firm that is faced with a potential entrant in a vertically differentiated market. It demonstrates than an incumbent firm cannot prevent entry through product proliferation because of a commitment problem.

We study in this paper how the technological flexibility choices and equilibrium configurations depend first on the industry characteristics (demand function and cost parameters specific to the multiproduct flexible technology and to the product dedicated technologies) and, second, on the...

We show that whether observing technological choices made by the competitors is possible or not has significant impact on the equilibrium technological configurations. Depending upon the industry characteristics, the strategic value of technological flexibility may be either positive or...

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...

It has been shown that if buyers have zero search cost and the remainder a common positive search cost, and sellers post prices, then there is a unique symmetric Nash equilibrium-sellers choose a price distribution. We show that increasing the number of search cost types results in another...