Gérard Gaudet

Uniqueness of Cournot Equilibrium: New Results From Old Methods

This paper provides sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique Cournot equilibrium. Previous uniqueness results have depended on an assumption of non-degeneracy of equilibrium. As we illustrate, this assumption often fails in multi-stage games with proper Cournot subgames. Since our uniqueness results do not depend on this assumption, they are more widely applicable. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.) (This abstract was borrowed from another version of t (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Mergers of producers of perfect complements competing in price

Abstract The endogenous merger model of Kamien and Zang (QJE, 1990) is generalized to price competition with perfect complements and used to show that some socially desirable mergers will fail to occur. We also clarify the link between this merger model and the ‘exogenous merger’ literature.

On comparing monopoly and competition in exhaustible resource exploitation

Abstract It is widely believed that exhaustible resource monopolies do not enjoy as much market power as standard non-resource monopolies, and may even produce in a socially optimal way. We argue that this paradoxical result arises from an inappropriate comparison methodology. When similar assumptions are applied to the resource, and the conventional cases, we show that the resource monopoly behaves as expected, i.e., restricts supply.

Optimal Resource Royalties with Unknown and Temporally Independent Extraction Cost Structures

The authors study optimal nonrenewable resource royalty contracts when the extracting agent has private information on costs. This is a dynamic incentive problem in which the repeated relationship between the principal and the agent is constrained by initial reserves. Commitment is limited to one period and costs are intertemporally independent. Compared with full information extraction, information asymmetry shifts production to the future when the optimal contract requires exhaustion in two periods. When exhaustion by all types in two periods is not warranted, the effect on the terminal period is ambiguous and the output of even the lowest cost firm is always distorted. Copyright 1995 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.

The Alberta dilemma: optimal sharing of a water resource by an agricultural and an oil sector

The purpose of this paper is to characterize the optimal time paths of production and water usage by an agricultural and an oil sector that have to share a limited water resource. We show that for any given water stock, if the oil stock is sufficiently large, it will become optimal to have a phase during which the agricultural sector is inactive. This may mean having an initial phase during which the two sectors are active, then a phase during which the water is reserved for the oil sector and the agricultural sector is inactive, followed by a phase during which both sectors are active again. The agricultural sector will always be active in the end as the oil stock is depleted and the demand for water from the oil sector decreases. In the case where agriculture is not constrained by the given natural inflow of water once there is no more oil, we show that oil extraction will always end with a phase during which oil production follows a pure Hotelling path, with the implicit price of oil net of extraction cost growing at the rate of interest. If the natural inflow of water does constitute a constraint for agriculture, then oil production never follows a pure Hotelling path, because its full marginal cost must always reflect not only the imputed rent on the finite oil stock, but also the positive opportunity cost of water.

The Evolution of Natural Resource Prices under Stochastic Investment Opportunities: An Intertemporal Asset-Pricing Approach

The authors consider the competitive equilibrium of an economy with technological uncertainty in the production of a composite good and in the extraction of a nonrenewable natural resource. The familiar Hotelling-type rule takes the form of the intertemporal asset-pricing equation of portfolio theory. It characterizes the evolution of the resource price. In its so-called consumption-beta formulation, it predicts that the expected excess return to holding the resource in the ground is proportional to the covariance between the return to holding the resource and the rate of change of per capita consumption. This suggests a framework for testing the Hotelling rule. Copyright 1991 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.

Complementarity, coordination and compatibility: The role of fixed costs in the economics of systems☆

Abstract We analyze industry equilibrium and incentive to compatibility when goods produced by different producers generate utility only when consumed as component parts of a system. We assume the presence of two systems, each composed of some basic component and a set of differentiated complementary products. The combination of complementarity between the two components of the system and of fixed costs in the production of the complementary product results in a form of network effect. We focus on the role played by the size of the fixed costs in the production of the complementary products in determining the size of this system effect and, by this means, the structure and types of equilibria that may be observed: monopolistic or duopolistic, symmetric or asymmetric. We also highlight the consequence of the same fixed costs for the private and social incentives to render the systems compatible.

A note on uncertainty and the hotelling rule

Abstract In this paper we derive the Hotelling rule of optimal natural resource depletion, modified to account for uncertainty in rates of return. It is shown that in the presence of risk aversion, the rule implies that the expected equilibrium rate of increase of net resource price must equal the expected rate of interest if and only if there exists a zero covariance between the marginal utility of consumption and the difference between the rate of net price increase and the rate of interest. The sign of this covariance is an empirical question, as an example illustrates.

The Efficient Use of Multiple Sources of a Nonrenewable Resource Under Supply Cost Uncertainty

Uncertainties as to future supply costs of nonrenewable natural resources, such as oil and gas, raise the issue of the choice of supply sources. In a perfectly deterministic world, an efficient use of multiple sources of supply requires that any given market exhausts the supply it can draw from a low cost source before moving on to a higher cost one; supply sources should be exploited in strict sequence of increasing marginal cost, with a high cost source being left untouched as long as a less costly source is available. We find that this may not be the efficient thing to do in a stochastic world. We show that there exist conditions under which it can be efficient to use a risky supply source in order to conserve a cheaper non risky source. The benefit of doing this comes from the fact that it leaves open the possibility of using it instead of the risky source in the event the latter’s future cost conditions suddenly deteriorate. There are also conditions under which it will be efficient to use a more costly non risky source while a less costly risky source is still available. The reason is that this conserves the less costly risky source in order to use it in the event of a possible future drop in its cost.

Trade Liberalization and the Profitability of Domestic Mergers

It is often thought that a tariff reduction, by opening-up the domestic market to foreign firms, should lessen the need for a policy aimed at discouraging domestic mergers. This implicitly assumes that the tariff in question is sufficiently high to prevent foreign firms from selling in the domestic market. However, not all tariffs are prohibitive, so that foreign firms may be present in the domestic market before it is abolished. Furthermore, even if the tariff is prohibitive, a merger of domestic firms may render it nonprohibitive, thus inviting foreign firms to penetrate the domestic market. Using a simple example, the authors show that, in the latter two cases, abolishing the tariff may in fact make the domestic merger more profitable. Hence trade liberalization will not necessarily reduce the profitability of domestic mergers. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.