Product Differentiation in a Vertical Structure

We consider final goods producers’ preference for horizontal product differentiation in the presence of strategic input price determination. Final goods producers may not prefer maximal differentiation but may prefer moderate differentiation under both Cournot and Bertrand competition in the final goods market if product differentiation does not increase the market size significantly and there is either free entry in the input market or the input supplier has increasing returns to scale technology. Thus, we provide a new rationale for moderate product differentiation. Our reasons are different from the existing reasons of mixed pricing strategy, endogenous leadership, no-buy option for the consumers and the relative performance incentive schemes.

Codetermination, Price Competition and the Network Industry

This research develops a tractable two-stage non-cooperative game with complete information describing the behaviour of price-setting firms that must choose to be profit maximisers or bargainers under codetermination in a network industry with horizontal product differentiation. The existing theoretical literature has already shown that codetermination might arise as the endogenous market outcome in a strategic competitive quantity-setting duopoly. In sharp contrast with this result, the present article shows that codetermination does never emerge as a Nash equilibrium in a price-setting non-network duopoly. Then, it aims at highlighting the role of network externalities in determining changes of paradigm of the game and letting codetermination become a sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium when prices are strategic substitutes or strategic complements. This equilibrium may be Pareto efficient. Results allow distinguishing between mandatory codetermination and voluntary codetermination. The article also proposes a model of endogenous codetermination according to which every firm may choose to bargain with its own corresponding union bargaining unit only whether the firm’s bargaining strength is exactly the profit-maximising one. The equilibrium outcomes emerging in this case range from a uniform Nash equilibrium, in which both firms are codetermined, to mixed Nash equilibria, in which only one of them chooses to be codetermined. These results are ‘network depending’ and do not hold in a non-network duopoly.

Chaos in Oligopoly Models

In this article, the authors investigate the dynamics of two oligopoly games. In the first game, they consider a nonlinear Cournot-type duopoly game with homogeneous goods and same rational expectations. The authors investigate the case, where managers have a variety of attitudes toward relative performance that are indexed by their type. In the second game they consider a Cournot-Bertrand duopoly game with linear demand, quadratic cost function and differentiated goods. In the two games they suppose a linear demand and a quadratic cost function. The games are modeled with a system of two difference equations. Existence and stability of equilibria of the systems are studied. The authors show that the models gives more complex, chaotic and unpredictable trajectories, as a consequence of change in the parameter k of speed of the player's adjustment (in the first game) and in the parameter d of the horizontal product differentiation (in the second game). The authors prove that the variation of the parameter k (resp. d) destabilizes the Nash equilibrium via a period doubling bifurcation (resp. through a Neimark-Sacker bifurcation). The chaotic features are justified numerically via computing Lyapunov numbers and sensitive dependence on initial conditions. In the second game they show that in the case of a quadratic cost there are stable trajectories and a higher or lower degree of product differentiation does not tend to destabilize the economy. They verify these results through numerical simulations. Finally, the authors control the chaotic behavior of the games introducing a new parameter. For some values of this parameter, the Nash equilibrium is stable for every value of the main parameter k or d.

Analysis of Nonlinear Duopoly Games with Product Differentiation: Stability, Global Dynamics, and Control

Many researchers have used quadratic utility function to study its influences on economic games with product differentiation. Such games include Cournot, Bertrand, and a mixed-type game called Cournot-Bertrand. Within this paper, a cubic utility function that is derived from a constant elasticity of substitution production function (CES) is introduced. This cubic function is more desirable than the quadratic one besides its amenability to efficiency analysis. Based on that utility a two-dimensional Cournot duopoly game with horizontal product differentiation is modeled using a discrete time scale. Two different types of games are studied in this paper. In the first game, firms are updating their output production using the traditional bounded rationality approach. In the second game, firms adopt Puu’s mechanism to update their productions. Puu’s mechanism does not require any information about the profit function; instead it needs both firms to know their production and their profits in the past time periods. In both scenarios, an explicit form for the Nash equilibrium point is obtained under certain conditions. The stability analysis of Nash point is considered. Furthermore, some numerical simulations are carried out to confirm the chaotic behavior of Nash equilibrium point. This analysis includes bifurcation, attractor, maximum Lyapunov exponent, and sensitivity to initial conditions.