Unbundling Production with Decreasing Average Costs
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Oriol Carbonell-Nicolau
Abstract
This paper argues that, even in the presence of decreasing average costs of production, monopolies can sometimes be avoided in the interest of market efficiency. It is shown that under certain conditions on the variable cost of production, there is an alternate, viable market structure that reduces the well-known deadweight loss of monopoly: an “upstream” market in which one or more firms own and share the fixed cost of creating and maintaining a distribution network, and a “downstream” market populated by a large number of firms that are charged a unit price for the network’s usage.
Acknowledgements
This paper benefited from valuable comments provided by Tomas Sjöström and an anonymous referee.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Research Articles
- Optimal Forestry Contract with Interdependent Costs
- Bi and Branching Strict Nash Networks in Two-way Flow Models: A Generalized Sufficient Condition
- Pay-What-You-Want in Competition
- Two Rationales for Insufficient Entry
- Students’ Social Origins and Targeted Grading
- Pricing, Signalling, and Sorting with Frictions
- On the Economic Value of Signals
- The Core in Bertrand Oligopoly TU-Games with Transferable Technologies
- Reasoning About ‘When’ Instead of ‘What’: Collusive Equilibria with Stochastic Timing in Repeated Oligopoly
- Timing Games with Irrational Types: Leverage-Driven Bubbles and Crash-Contingent Claims
- Costly Rewards and Punishments
- Blocking Coalitions and Fairness in Asset Markets and Asymmetric Information Economies
- Strategic Activism in an Uncertain World
- On Equilibrium Existence in a Finite-Agent, Multi-Asset Noisy Rational Expectations Economy
- Optimal Incentives Under Gift Exchange
- Public Good Indices for Games with Several Levels of Approval
- Vagueness of Language: Indeterminacy under Two-Dimensional State-Uncertainty
- Winners and Losers of Universal Health Insurance: A Macroeconomic Analysis
- Behavioral Theory of Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma: Generous Tit-For-Tat Strategy
- Flourishing as Productive Tension: Theory and Model
- Notes
- A Note on Reference-Dependent Choice with Threshold Representation
- Regular Equilibria and Negative Welfare Implications in Delegation Games
- Unbundling Production with Decreasing Average Costs
- A Simple and Procedurally Fair Game Form for Nash Implementation of the No-Envy Solution
- Decision Making and Games with Vector Outcomes
- Capital Concentration and Wage Inequality
- Annuity Markets and Capital Accumulation
