Taste for variety and endogenous fluctuations in a monopolistic competition model

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Taste for variety and endogenous fluctuations in a monopolistic competition model

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Thomas Seegmuller () (Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne)

Abstract

In past years, imperfect competition has been introduced in several dynamic models to show how mark-up variability, increasing returns (decreasing marginal cost) and monopoly profits affect the occurence of endogenous fluctuations. In this paper, we focus on another possible feature of imperfectly competitive economies : consumers' taste for variety due to endogenous product diversity. Introducing monopolistic competition (Dixit and Stiglitz (1977), Benassy (1996)) in an overlapping generations model where consumers have taste for variety, we show that local indeterminacy can occur under the three following conditions : a high substitution between capital and labor, increasing returns arbitrarily small and a not too elastic labor supply. The key mechanism for this result is based on the fact that, due to taste for variety, the aggregate price decreases with the pro-cyclical product diversity which has a direct influence on the real wage and the real interest rate.

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Paper provided by Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne in its series Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne with number v07004.

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Length: 22 pages
Date of creation: Jan 2007
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Handle: RePEc:mse:cesdoc:v07004

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
C62 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods and Programming - - - Existence and Stability Conditions of Equilibrium
D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure and Pricing - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection
E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

NEP-ALL-2007-02-24 (All new papers)
NEP-DGE-2007-02-24 (Dynamic General Equilibrium)
NEP-MAC-2007-02-24 (Macroeconomics)

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