Publicação
Transport and asymmetries in spatial competition
| Resumo: | The spatial competition litterature provides a fairly good description of the interaction of two selllers located in a market segment and competing for the consumers distributed along that segment. The game is usually modeled as a two-stage game. In the first stage the firms select locations anticipating the competition in prices, as in Hotelling (1929), or in quantities, as described in Beckmann and Thisse (1986 pp. 47-49}, in the second. This litterature turns mainly around two questions: does the locational pattern of the firms in equilibrium entail minimum or maximal differentiation? In the case of price competition, is there a Nash price equilibrium for all firms' locations, i. e. is there stability in competition? Both questions were addressed by Hotelling in his 1929's paper and the latter question engendered an important research field which began with D'Aspremont, Gabszewicz and Thisse (1979). This paper tries to deal with some aspects of spatial competition which have been less discussed by the existing litterature. Spatial competition models are usually static. The impact of the improvement of transport technologies which appears through decaying transport rates in time is seldom dealt, although the subject has been introduced by Launhardt's (1885) seminal work and it is implicitly present in Smithies (1941 ). Most spatial oligopoly models are symmetric, both in what concerns the productive efficiency of firms and the spatial distribution of consumers. Lastly, most spatial competition models use only one kind of competition in the second stage of the game, either price or quantity competition. |
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| Autores principais: | Pontes, José Pedro |
| Assunto: | Firms Locations Transport Transport Costs Spatial Competition Asymmetric Models |
| Ano: | 1997 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | artigo |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade de Lisboa |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa |
| Resumo: | The spatial competition litterature provides a fairly good description of the interaction of two selllers located in a market segment and competing for the consumers distributed along that segment. The game is usually modeled as a two-stage game. In the first stage the firms select locations anticipating the competition in prices, as in Hotelling (1929), or in quantities, as described in Beckmann and Thisse (1986 pp. 47-49}, in the second. This litterature turns mainly around two questions: does the locational pattern of the firms in equilibrium entail minimum or maximal differentiation? In the case of price competition, is there a Nash price equilibrium for all firms' locations, i. e. is there stability in competition? Both questions were addressed by Hotelling in his 1929's paper and the latter question engendered an important research field which began with D'Aspremont, Gabszewicz and Thisse (1979). This paper tries to deal with some aspects of spatial competition which have been less discussed by the existing litterature. Spatial competition models are usually static. The impact of the improvement of transport technologies which appears through decaying transport rates in time is seldom dealt, although the subject has been introduced by Launhardt's (1885) seminal work and it is implicitly present in Smithies (1941 ). Most spatial oligopoly models are symmetric, both in what concerns the productive efficiency of firms and the spatial distribution of consumers. Lastly, most spatial competition models use only one kind of competition in the second stage of the game, either price or quantity competition. |
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