In a capacity-then-price-setting game we experimentally identify capacity precommitment, the possibility to communicate before price choices, and prior competition experience as crucial factors for collusive pricing. The theoretical analysis determines the capacity thresholds above which firms...

We analyze the strategic protection decision of an innovator between a patent and secrecy in a setting with horizontally differentiated products. By introducing the patenting decision into the well known circular city model, the impact of the disclosure requirement linked to a patent application...

As is well-known from the literature on oligopolistic competition with incomplete information, firms have an incentive to share private demand information. However, by assuming verifiability of demand data, these models ignore the possibility of strategic misinformation. We show that if firms...

Die präsentierte Studie untersuchte Bestimmungsgründe der F&E-Tätigkeit von deutschen Industrieunternehmen im Zeitraum von 1992 bis 2000. Die modelltheoretischen Analysen dienten dazu, testbare Hypothesen über wesentliche Einflussfaktoren und deren Wirkungsrichtungen auf die F&E-Aktivitäten...

We show that concealing cost information is a dominant strategy in heterogeneous Bertrand oligopolies. This result enables us to endogenize the number of firms in a market in terms of market size, entry costs, and unit cost uncertainty.

This paper analyzes endogenous merger formation in oligopolistic markets where firms have different unit production costs. We reformulate the merger model, introduced by Barros (1998), by employing the core as cooperative equilibrium concept. We show that, depending on the size asymmetry in the...