Bertrand competition under decreasing returns involves a wide interval of pure strategy equilibrium prices. We first present results of experiments in which two, three and four identical firms repeatedly interact in this environment. Less collusion with more firms leads to lower average prices....

The literature on deregulated electricity markets generally assumes available capacities to be given. In contrast, this paper studies a model where firms precommit to capacity levels before competing in a uniform price auction. The analysis sheds light on recent empirical findings that firms use...

Consider an oligopolistic industry composed of two groups (or populations) of firms, the low cost firms and the high cost firms. The firms produce a homogeneous good. I study the finite population evolutionarily stable strategy defined by Schaffer (1988), and the long run equilibrium in the...

It is shown that the equilibrium notion of an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) does have predictive power for standard models of Bertrand competition. This is in contrast to a recent claim by Qin and Stuart (1997). The claim is based on the observation that the solution concept ESS behaves...

We study mass customization in a duopoly game in which the firms' products have different qualities. Whether customization choices are made simultaneously or sequentially is endogenously determined. Specifically, the customization stage of the game involves two periods. Each firm either selects...

Following Bernheim and Whinston (1990), this paper addresses the effects of multimarket contact on firms' ability to collude. Real world imperfections tend to make firms' objective function strictly concave and market supergames "interdependent": firms' payoffs in each market depend on how they...

Following Bernheim and Whinston (1990), this paper addresses the effects of multimarket contact on firms' ability to collude. Real world imperfections tend to make firms' objective function strictly concave and market supergames "interdependent": firms' payoffs in each market depend on how they...

We consider a model of oligopolistic firms that have private information about their cost structure. Prior to competing in the market a competitive advantage, i.e., a cost reducing technology, is allocated to a subset of the firms by means of a multi-object auction. After the auction either all...

We use experiments to analyze what type of communication is most effective in achieving cooperation in a simple collusion game. Consistent with the existing literature on communication and collusion, even minimal communication leads to a short run increase in collusion. However, in a limited...