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....

Industries with mixed oligopoly are exceedingly popular all over the world, especially in developing countries, such as China. This paper highlights the innovation strategies of mixed duopoly with a (semi-) public firm and another private firm, and the effects of mixed oligopoly on innovation...

A basic issue in transboundary fishery management is the new member problem. In this paper we address the problem of allocating the profits between the charter members and the entrants, once the nations concerned have expressed an interest in achieving an agreement.Using game theory we argue...

We examine a market in which consumers are forced to rely on noisy price signals to select between homogeneous products. The noise originates either from firms' price obfuscation or consumers' bounded information processing capabilities. Standard models and empirical experiments of markets with...

In this note we study a very simple trial & error learning process in the context of a Cournot oligopoly. Without any knowledge of the payoff functions players increase, respectively decrease, their quantity by one unit as long as this leads to higher profits. We show that this process converges...

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 the framework of symmetric Cournot oligopoly, this paper provides two minimal sets of assumptions on the demand and cost functions that imply respectively that, as the number of firms increases, the minimal and maximal equilibria lead to (i) decreasing industry price and increasing or...

In a carrot game for a player, that player must help his opponent in order to get a desired response. In a stick game for a player, that player must hurt his opponent to get a desired response. We show that most all smooth monotonic two player games can be classified as: carrot for both, carrot...

We study endogenous coalition formation in contexts where individual (and group) payoffs depend on the entire coalition structure that might form. We capture potential interaction across coalitions by means of a partition function.