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Working Paper
Competition by choice
This paper relates firm location choice and consumer search. Firms that cluster together attract consumers by facilitating price comparison, but clustering increases the intensity of local competition. I construct a simple model which shows that firms may choose head-on competition by locating together. In special cases, this can be the unique equilibrium outcome. I also use the model to show that price setting firms may earn more in equilibrium than quantity setting firms.
Working Paper
The timing of consumer arrivals in Edgeworth's duopoly model
In his classic Papers relating to Political Economy (1897), Francis Edgeworth demonstrated that when duopolists have limited productive capacity, there may be no Nash equilibrium in prices. One feature of Edgeworth's model is that consumers are assumed to meet with the duopolists at the same time. ; This paper analyzes a version of the Edgeworth model in which consumers arrive sequentially instead of simultaneously. This departure from Edgeworth's framework should seem reasonable since there are few markets besides auctions in which buyers all meet with sellers at the same time. ; The point ...