We consider a differentiated duopoly and endogenise the firm choice of the strategy variable (price or quantity) to play on the product market in the presence of network externalities. We model this choice by assuming both competition between entrepreneurial (owner-managed) firms and competition between managerial firms in which market decisions are delegated from owners to revenue-concerned managers. While network externalities are shown not to alter the symmetric equilibrium quantity choice arising in the no-delegation case, sufficiently strong network effects allow us to eliminate the multiplicity of equilibria under delegation and lead to a unique equilibrium in which both firms choose price.

We investigate how market competition affects the incentive to adopt a non-profit-maximizing behaviour. The analysis is developed in a strategic delegation framework in which owners delegate output decisions to managers interested in firm's relative performance. We study how the optimal delegation scheme is affected by market concentration and the elasticity of market demand. We prove that the distortion from a profit-maximizing rule decreases as market becomes less concentrated, while it increases as demand becomes more elastic. Finally, we discuss the impact of market competitiveness on the welfare-enhancing ability of delegation contracts. Codice Scopus: 2-s2.0-80054752522

We enquiry about the effects of first and second order stochastic dominance shifts of the distribution of the consumers' willingness to pay, within the standard model of a market with network externalities and hump-shaped demand curve. This issue is analyzed in the polar cases of perfect competition and monopoly. We find that, while under perfect competition both types of distributional changes result in higher output, provided marginal costs are low enough, in the monopoly case the final outcome depends on the way income distribution and the network externality interact in determining market demand elasticity.

The paper discusses the role of delegation to managers in a duopoly in which the optimal decisions upon in-house production and outsourcing may lead make and buy to coexist, namely bi-sourcing to arise at equilibrium. In the benchmark framework of quantity competition, outsourcing to an inefficient external manufacturing is shown to be strategically used under bi-sourcing with the aim to exploit market advantages induced by delegation. Strategic reasons for adopting either outsourcing or in-house production, besides leading firm's profits to increase in the cost of internal or external production, let delegation not be the optimal (unique) endogenous choice, which contrasts with previous studies. It may also cause, under sufficiently high product differentiation, a reversal of the advantage of the delegating (first-mover) firm over the non-delegating (second-mover) rival.

We study the optimal manipulation rules of a public firm’s objective function in a mixed oligopoly with imperfect product substitutability. We start with a baseline duopoly model and compare the solutions under quantity and price competition, and the way they are affected by product substitutability. This allows us to show that partial privatization, strategic delegation and other specific government’s commitments on the objective function of the public management can be looked at as special cases of these optimal rules, and to evaluate the viability of these policies under the two modes of competition. In this framework, we also discuss the equivalence between manipulation of the objective function and Stackelberg leadership. Since optimal manipulation rules change as new dimensions are added, we also derive the optimal rules under oligopoly, quadratic costs, and competition of international firms. This fairly general unified framework allows to discuss the impact of these factors on the government’s implementation policies of the optimal manipulation rules.

We consider the choice of price/quantity of a public and a private firm in a mixed differentiated duopoly. First, we study the way in which the strategic choice of the market variable is affected by different given organizational structures (managerial or entrepreneurial) of the public and the private firm. Second, we investigate how the price/quantity choice interacts with the endogenous choice of the organizational structure, thus determining a subgame perfect equilibrium at which firms choose to behave as price-setters and to adopt a managerial structure.

This paper investigates the endogenous choice of the strategic variable, price or quantity, taken in a mixed duopoly by a public and a private firm prior to market competition. While Matsumura and Ogawa (2012) in a standard mixed duopoly find that price is the unique equilibrium, we show that, by introducing firm subsidization in the same setting, quantity can constitute a dominant strategy equilibrium.

We investigate both quantity and price competition in two differentiated oligopolistic frameworks in which firms are heterogeneous with respect to the ownership structure, i.e. managerial firms compete against entrepreneurial firms, or to the timing decisions, i.e. leaders compete against followers. We show the circumstances under which delegation and sequential strategies, shown to be equivalent under unilateral delegation (Vickers, The Economic Journal, Vol. 95 (1985), pp. 138–147), enable firms to out-perform their rivals and create scope for welfare gains. The different effects of changes in market structure and the degree of product substitutability on firms’ profitability and social welfare are discussed. Codice Scopus: 2-s2.0-84862682963

By developing a linear model in a two-country framework of international price competition, we show how the degree of product differentiation and the cross-country distribution of private firms affect the strategic privatization choices made by governments concerned with their own country’s welfare. More particularly, the work points out that sufficiently low product differentiation may lead public ownership to be optimally chosen to restrict competition in the country with the larger number of firms, and privatization to be global welfare enhancing in this case.

We examine both quantity and price competition in a mixed oligopoly. In a market in which the adoption of commitment strategies enables the public firm or a government to achieve welfare gains, profits of both the public and the private firms turn out to be higher under Cournot than Bertrand competition. We therefore find that the profit ordering is reversed with respect to the scenario described by Ghosh and Mitra (2010), thus confirming both the higher competitiveness and the higher efficiency of price competition than quantity competition. Moreover, we demonstrate that welfare-maximizing behavior under commitment leads in a duopoly to the same aggregate profits under Cournot and Bertrand.

This paper reconsiders the literature on the irrelevance of privatization in mixed markets within which both quantity and price competition are investigated under product differentiation. By allowing for partially privatization of a state-controlled firm, we explore competition under different timings of firms’ moves and derive the conditions under which an optimal subsidy allows to achieve maximum efficiency. We show that, irrespective of the mode of competition, while the ownership of the controlled firm is irrelevant when firms play simultaneously, it matters when firms compete sequentially, requiring the leader to be publicly-owned for an optimal subsidy to restore the first-best. The paper also focuses on the extent to which a subsidy is needed to attain the social optimum in the considered scenarios, providing an ordering which highlights the subsidy equivalence between Cournot (Bertrand) private leadership and simultaneous Bertrand (Cournot) under duopoly and the dominance of the former in oligopoly.

The article shows that strategic quantity competition can be characterized by behavioral heterogeneity, once competing firms are allowed in a pre-market stage to optimally choose the behavioral rule they will follow in their strategic choice of quantities. In particular, partitions of the population of identical firms in which some of them are profit maximizers while others follow an alternative criterion, turn out to be deviation-proof equilibria both in simultaneous and sequential game structures. Our findings that in a strategic framework heterogeneous behavioral rules may be consistent with individual incentives is a first attempt to provide a game-theoretic microfoundation of heterogeneity.

The paper examines a quantity-location duopoly game in a spatial discrimination model in which the delivered goods are assumed to be imperfect substitutes or complements. By extending the range of the unit transportation cost analyzed in the existing literature, it is shown that a dispersed equilibrium arises in which the choice of the optimal locations is affected by the degree of product substitutability. The interaction between the latter and the size of the transportation cost is also discussed in order to verify its welfare implications. In particular, it is shown that in this spatial framework imperfect substitutability may increase welfare. Codice Scopus: 2-s2.0-79958859470

In an infinitely repeated Cournot game with trigger strategy punishment, we demonstrate that the relationship between market concentration and collusion sustainability depends on the strength of network externalities. The latter is shown to interact with the number of firms and to affect the profitability of cooperation vs. competition, which delivers the result, challenging conventional wisdom, that lower market concentration can make collusion more stable.