IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/restud/v84y2017i2p503-546..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Dynamic Oligopoly with Incomplete Information

Author

Listed:
  • Alessandro Bonatti
  • Gonzalo Cisternas
  • Juuso Toikka

Abstract

We consider learning and signalling in a dynamic Cournot oligopoly where firms have private information about their production costs and only observe the market price, which is subject to unobservable demand shocks. An equilibrium is Markov if play depends on the history only through the firms’ beliefs about costs and calendar time. We characterize symmetric linear Markov equilibria as solutions to a boundary value problem. In every such equilibrium, given a long enough horizon, play converges to the static complete information outcome for the realized costs, but each firm only learns its competitors’ average cost. The weights assigned to costs and beliefs under the equilibrium strategies are non-monotone over time. We explain this by decomposing incentives into signalling and learning, and discuss implications for prices, quantities, and welfare.

Suggested Citation

  • Alessandro Bonatti & Gonzalo Cisternas & Juuso Toikka, 2017. "Dynamic Oligopoly with Incomplete Information," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 84(2), pages 503-546.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:84:y:2017:i:2:p:503-546.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rdw049
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jeitschko, Thomas D. & Liu, Ting & Wang, Tao, 2018. "Information Acquisition, signaling and learning in duopoly," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 155-191.
    2. Taub, B., 2023. "Signal-jamming in the frequency domain," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 896-930.
    3. Gonzalo Cisternas & Aaron Kolb, 2020. "Signaling with Private Monitoring," Papers 2007.15514, arXiv.org.
    4. Harrington, Joseph E., 2021. "There may be no pass through of a merger-related cost efficiency," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 208(C).
    5. Pooya Molavi & Ceyhun Eksin & Alejandro Ribeiro & Ali Jadbabaie, 2016. "Learning to Coordinate in Social Networks," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 64(3), pages 605-621, June.
    6. Yi Wang & Hui Wang & Shubing Guo, 2019. "Research on Dynamic Game Model and Application of China’s Imported Soybean Price in the Context of China-US Economic and Trade Friction," Complexity, Hindawi, vol. 2019, pages 1-13, November.
    7. Z. Eddie Ning & J. Miguel Villas-Boas, 2022. "Following the Customers: Dynamic Competitive Repositioning," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(2), pages 1002-1018, February.
    8. Cetemen, D. & Cisternas, G. & Kolb, A. & Viswanathan, S., 2022. "Activist Manipulation Dynamics," Working Papers 22/04, Department of Economics, City University London.
    9. John Asker & Chaim Fershtman & Jihye Jeon & Ariel Pakes, 2020. "A computational framework for analyzing dynamic auctions: The market impact of information sharing," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 51(3), pages 805-839, September.
    10. Doruk Cetemen & Gonzalo Cisternas & Aaron Kolb & S Viswanathan, 2022. "Leader-Follower Dynamics in Shareholder Activism," Staff Reports 1030, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Dynamic oligopoly; Asymmetric information; Learning; Signalling; Continuous time;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C73 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games
    • D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:84:y:2017:i:2:p:503-546.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/restud .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.