The monopolist's incentives towards product and process innovations are evaluated against the social optimum. The main findings are that (i) the incentive to invest in cost-reducing R&D is inversely related to the number of varieties being supplied at equilibrium, under both regimes; (ii)...

We investigate a differential duopoly game with horizontal product differentiation and advertising efforts aimed at increasing market demand, to show that the standard approach to spatial competition fails to produce a pure-strategy price equilibrium in a dynamic game framework. This holds...

The issue of technical progress under uncertainty is nested into the debate on vertical integration versus outsourcing, to show that, in general, the former is preferable to the latter in terms of both expected profits and technological efficiency. It is then shown that there exist (i) an...

An inductive procedure is adopted to evaluate the behaviour of a multiproduct profit seeking monopolist vis à vis that of a social planner, in a model where there is a continuum of consumers characterized by different marginal willingness to pay for the quality. When the market is completely...

We analyse trade in vertically differentiated goods between a rich and a poor country. In autarky two monopolists, selling a single product, operate in two countries which differ only for their per capita income. If trade opens, the firm operating in the poor country exports to the rich, giving...

We revisit Maxwell's (1998) analysis to show that his results are incompatible with the assumption of full market coverage. As a consequence, the effects of MQS regulation on the high-quality firm's incentive to adopt a more efficient technology cannot be assessed in this model.