IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/qed/wpaper/555.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

On the Effects of Sunk Costs

Author

Listed:
  • W. Bentley MacLeod

Abstract

This paper studies the effect of sunk cost on equilibria for a dynamic oligopoly with entry. Sunk costs are a hysteresis effect that cannot be adequately modelled in a static framework. When sunk costs are added to a dynamic model they do not act as a barrier to entry, contrary to general perception. Using the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium concept shows that as the fraction of costs that are sunk rises, the number of entrants rise and profits per firm fall.

Suggested Citation

  • W. Bentley MacLeod, 1984. "On the Effects of Sunk Costs," Working Paper 555, Economics Department, Queen's University.
  • Handle: RePEc:qed:wpaper:555
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Macleod, W. Bentley, 1985. "A theory of conscious parallelism," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 27(1), pages 25-44, February.

    More about this item

    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:qed:wpaper:555. 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: Mark Babcock (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/qedquca.html .

    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.