The Noisy Duopolist
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David Spector
Abstract
This paper provides an explanation for noisy pricing based on the strategic interaction of two firms competing in prices. When a firm adds noise to its prices, undercutting it becomes harder. Therefore, noisy pricing allows a firm to either exclude a competitor while charging supracompetitive prices, or to soften competition and have both firms earn supracompetitive profits. Such behavior leads to prices lying between competitive and monopolistic levels, and harms consumers and social welfare. It occurs in equilibrium if firms set prices sequentially, and in some equilibria of a repeated game of simultaneous price-setting if one firm is patient.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Local Conventions
- Equilibrium Departures from Common Knowledge in Games with Non-Additive Expected Utility
- Bargaining over Risky Assets
- Private Strategies in Finitely Repeated Games with Imperfect Public Monitoring
- Regulation by Negotiation: the Private Benefit Bias
- Joint Liability and Peer Monitoring under Group Lending
- The Noisy Duopolist
- Spontaneous Market Emergence
- A Simple Linear Programming Approach to Gain, Loss and Asset Pricing
- Forward Discount Bias, Nalebuff's Envelope Puzzle, and the Siegel Paradox in Foreign Exchange
- Risk Averse Supervisors and the Efficiency of Collusion
- Advances Article
- The Principal-Agent Matching Market