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In a monopoly, the equilibrium outcome is the same no matter if firms compete on price or on quantity. However, lots of firms have visible rivals with whom strategic interaction is a fact of life. This is known as imperfect competition. With imperfect competition, competing on price will lead to a different outcome than competing on quantity. Each firm needs to analyze what strategy, price or quantity, brings the highest profit for the firm and the highest surplus for the consumer. In order to compare and contrast price and quantity competition, two classical models of duopoly, the Cournot and the Bertrand model, are introduced. These two models can be analyzed according to different setups. Homogeneous and heterogeneous goods are considered. Also, it is important to distinguish between simultaneous and sequential move of the firms in their strategic interaction. The sequential choosing of actions makes the game dynamic and is known as the Stackelberg game. Furthermore, it is necessary to distinguish between exogenous and endogenous moving time decision of the firms. This analysis should be especially useful to students and researchers in Microeconomics.
In a recent paper, Alipranti et al. (2014, Price vs. quantity competition in a vertically related market, Economics Letters, 124: 122-126) show that in a vertically related market Cournot competition yields higher social welfare compared to Bertrand competition if the upstream firm subsidises the quantity setting downstream firm's production via negative wholesale input prices. However, the assumption of negative input prices is not economically viable as it would encourage the downstream firms to buy an unbounded amount of inputs knowing that the upstream firm would pay the downstream firms for each unit of input they purchase. We show that the welfare ranking may be reversed once we introduce a non-negativity constraint on the input price.
Does the social comparison still intensify the competition among sellers in volatile markets? In this paper, we study the price competition in markets with volatile sizes and, importantly, with sellers that socially compare their profits with each other ex post for any realization of market sizes. While the classic social comparison theory, as well as conventional wisdom, has long suggested that the comparison behavior such as behind aversion (upward comparison) and ahead seeking (downward comparison) will intensify competition, we reveal how social comparisons can totally have opposite-directional impacts once interacting with the market variability. In particular, we show that a stronger behind aversion behavior will still intensify the price competition, yet somewhat surprisingly, the impact of ahead seeking is variability-dependent: there is a threshold on the market size variability such that the competition between sellers will, in fact, be softened if markets are more volatile than such a threshold, and vice versa. Interestingly, the aforementioned predictions go in the other direction when sellers are selling complementary products: we will have the impacts of behind aversion variability-dependent while the ahead seeking is always pro-competitive. Our insights are robust under a general demand structure and demand shock specifications, asymmetry in sellers and markets, and sellers' misperceptions in market variabilities. Our work sheds light on other interactions of strategic complements or substitutes in the presence of social comparisons, e.g., quantity competition and advertising competition.
We consider the endogenous choice of strategic variable (price or quantity) in a duopoly market for differentiated goods in the presence of network externalities. We show that if the rival goods are substitutes in demand, but the degree of network compatibility is large enough to outweigh the substitution effects, each firm chooses price as its strategic variable. This finding is a rare exception to the usual result that if the goods are substitutes, each firm would choose quantity as its strategic variable. Moreover, we show that two non-standard results hold when the above condition is satisfied and the efficiency difference between the two firms is large. First, the price of the less efficient firm is higher under price competition than under quantity competition. Second, in a situation where one firm sets quantity and the other firm sets price, the profit of the more efficient firm is higher when it is the quantity-setter than when it is the price-setter, and the opposite is true for the less efficient firm.
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Essay from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: A, University of Bradford, course: MBA, language: English, abstract: Two questions are covered by this paper: 2 a) Compare and contrast the models of perfect competition and monopoly. (50%) 2 b) “Monopoly profits are essential for higher innovation rates and future economic growth.” Evaluate this statement. (50%)