B. Curtis Eaton

The Theory of Market Pre-emption: The Persistence of Excess Capacity and Monopoly in Growing Spatial Markets

It was not inevitable that it [Alcoal should always anticipate increases in demand for ingot and be prepared to supply them. Nothing compelled it to keep doubling and redoubling its capacity before others entered the field. It insists that it never excluded competitors, but we can think of no more effective exclusion than progressively to embrace each new opportunity as it opened, and to face each new comer with new capacity already geared into a giant organization ... .I

Capital, Commitment, and Entry Equilibrium

A primary concern of recent oligopoly literature has been the use of product-specific capital to impose asymmetric market solutions, including the deterrence of entry. This article explores the surprisingly neglected topic of the correspondence between the nature of product-specific capital (PSC) and the properties of entry equilibrium. The nature of PSC determines the type of entry with which firms must be concerned (predatory entry, where the entrant replaces an existing firm, or augmenting entry, where the entrant does not), the instruments available to effect asymmetry, the ability to impose asymmetric solutions, and their profitability.

A Theory of Market Structure with Sequential Entry

This article sets out a theory of market structure with sequential entry. We characterize the perfect Nash equilibrium to the entry game in several propositions. First, equilibria never involve excess capacity. Second, a sufficient statistic for the entry of any firm is that its profits are positive when computed myopically, i.e., with no further entry. Third, the equilibrium number of firms is the smallest number that can deter entry. Fourth, aggregate output in equilibrium is no smaller than the limit output. We calculate some explicit solutions to the model and examine comparative static properties.

Technology-Traditing Coalitions in Supergames

We attempt to explain the observation that rival firms often share their technologies. We show that the trading of technical information over the long haul can be sustained as an equilibrium in supergames. The strategy of ejection of a cheating firm from a technology-trading coalition, followed by the continuation of technology trading by the noncheating members, better facilitates trading than does a strategy in which cheating results in the dissolution of the coalition. Technology trading is often welfare improving, and firms may form small coalitions.

Well-being and Affluence in the Presence of a Veblen Good

The happiness literature has established that, in the developed countries, increasing affluence has not increased well-being in recent decades. We seek an explanation for this in terms of conspicuous consumption, a phenomenon originally identified by Veblen. We develop some simple general equilibrium models that incorporate a Veblen good, among others. In all of our models, as productivity increases, the Veblen good eventually dominates the economy in the sense that, by reducing leisure, more than all the added productivity is dissipated in the production of this good. Also, in the presence of a Veblen good, productivity increases destroy social capital. Copyright

The block metric and the law of markets

Abstract The “Law of Markets” as originally stated by Fetter and amended by Hyson and Hyson is based on the assumption that the transportation of goods is along a line segment from firm to customer. In many situations the assumption that transportation is along a block-like network of roads is a better approximation of reality. In this paper we establish the “law of markets” appropriate to the block metric. We discover that with such a metric there exist significant discontinuities in a firms demand functions and we argue that these discontinuities have important implications for the types of competitive strategies open to firms.

Know‐how sharing with stochastic innovations

We provide a model of know-how sharing between competing firms in which each of two firms gets a stochastic innovation in its stock of know-how in every period. Separately considering the cases when innovations are indivisible and divisible, we examine the nature of the subgame perfect sharing agreements that can obtain. We discover that both stochasticity and indivisibility undermine the ability to support sharing. Furthermore, we find that there are equilibria in which know-how sharing can be intermittent and that small innovations are more likely to be shared than large ones, when innovations are divisible but not necessarily when they are indivisible.

A Comment on Location and Industrial Efficiency with Free Entry

We consider Gees model of industrial location and prove analytically that, given Gees assumption of price discrimination, firms always wish to locate in the centres of their markets. This contrasts the result for mill-price-plus-transport-cost pricing where firm locate in the centres of interior markets, but not in the centres of peripheral markets. We also show that other of Gees results depend on his omission of a key equilibrium condition with respect to the relocation of firms already in the market. We reassert the propositions challenged by Gee, that pricing behaviour and the existence or non-existence of boundaries to the whole market critically affect the results derived from a broad class of industrial location models.

Existence Advertising, Price Competition, and Asymmetric Market Structure

We examine a two-stage duopoly game in which firms advertise their existence to consumers in stage 1 and compete in prices in stage 2. Whenever the advertising technology generates positive overlap in customer bases, the equilibrium for the stage-1 game is asymmetric in that one firm chooses to remain small in comparison to its competitor. For a specific random advertising technology, we show that one firm will always be half as large as the other. No pure-strategy price equilibrium exists in the stage-2 game, and as long as there is some overlap in customer bases, the mixed-strategy price equilibrium does not converge to the Bertrand equilibrium.

Evolutionary Stability in the Investment-Opportunism-Retaliation Game

Can economically efficient outcomes be obtained and sustained in the absence of externally enforced property rights? We study the evolutionary properties of a game that exhibits two well-defined Nash equilibria: one generates an inefficient outcome while the other set generates an efficient outcome supported by the potential for retaliation. Although standard forward-looking refinements eliminate the efficient equilibrium, neither equilibrium type satisfies strict evolutionary stability criteria. However, both types of equilibrium define strategies that are neutrally stable, which makes them vulnerable to drift in dynamic environments. We conduct computer simulation experiments in which players learn adaptively via a tournament selection mechanism called sophisticated experimentation. Our simulations demonstrate that while the system spends a disproportionately high proportion of time in the inefficient equilibrium set, the efficient equilibrium is pervasive as the system drifts back and forth between the equilibrium sets, never settling on one or the other.