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Welfare losses under cournot competition

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  • Corchón, Luis C.

Abstract

We find that in a market for a homogeneous good where firms are identical, compete in quantities and produce with constant returns, the percentage of wel-fare losses (PWL) is small with as few as five competitors for a class of demand functions which includes linear and isoelastic cases. However with fixed costs and asymmetric firms PWL can be large. We provide exact formulae of PWL and robust constructions of markets were PWL is close to one in these two cases. We show that the market structure that maximizes PWL is either monopoly or dominant firm, depending on demand. Finally we prove that PWL is minimized when all firms are identical, a clear indication that the assumption of identical firms biases the estimation of PWL downwards.

Suggested Citation

  • Corchón, Luis C., 2006. "Welfare losses under cournot competition," UC3M Working papers. Economics we063910, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía.
    • Handle: RePEc:cte:werepe:we063910
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    2. Münter, Markus Thomas, 2017. "Endogenous number of firms, horizontal concentration and heterogeneity of firms—A note," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 154(C), pages 74-76.
    3. Pedro Ferreira, 2017. "Welfare Changes in the Cournot Setting with an Empirical Application to the Telecommunications Industry," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 65(1), pages 194-213, March.
    4. Argenziano, Rossella & Schmidt-Dengler, Philipp, 2012. "Inefficient entry order in preemption games," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 48(6), pages 445-460.
    5. Ritz Robert A., 2009. "Cost Pass-Through under Delegation," The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 8(1), pages 1-19, January.
    6. Simai He & Xiaoguo Wang & Shuzhong Zhang, 2013. "On a generalized Cournot oligopolistic competition game," Journal of Global Optimization, Springer, vol. 56(4), pages 1335-1345, August.
    7. Corchón, Luis C. & Zudenkova, Galina, 2009. "Computing welfare losses from data under imperfect competition with heterogeneous goods," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 27(6), pages 646-654, November.
    8. Andrew F. Newman & Patrick Legros, 2011. "Incomplete Contracts and Industrial Organization: A Survey," Boston University - Department of Economics - Working Papers Series WP2011-036, Boston University - Department of Economics.
    9. Tsitsiklis, John N. & Xu, Yunjian, 2014. "Efficiency loss in a Cournot oligopoly with convex market demand," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 46-58.
    10. Meunier, Guy, 2010. "Capacity choice, technology mix and market power," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 32(6), pages 1306-1315, November.
    11. Baosen Zhang & Ramesh Johari & Ram Rajagopal, 2015. "Competition and Efficiency of Coalitions in Cournot Games with Uncertainty," Papers 1503.02479, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2017.
    12. Argenziano, Rossella & Schmidt-Dengler, Philipp, 2013. "Competition, timing of entry and welfare in a preemption game," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 120(3), pages 509-512.

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