IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/por/fepwps/445.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Spatial Competition and Firms’ Location Decisions under Cost Uncertainty

Author

Listed:
  • Ricardo Biscaia

    (CIPES - Center for Research in Higher Education Policies; Faculty of Economics, University of Porto)

  • Paula Sarmento

    (CEF.UP; Faculty of Economics of University of Porto)

Abstract

This paper considers a two-staged Location-Price game à la Hotelling, where firms first choose their location in the linear city and then set the prices for their goods. A lack of information arises, because before choosing their location firms are not sure about the marginal cost of their good. However, they know the two possible outcomes and their probability of occurrence in advance. We conclude that contrary to the perfect information case, firms may agglomerate at any point in the city, given that the difference between the marginal cost outcomes is sufficiently high for either firm. Also, we conclude that prices are, on average, lower in perfect information. Regarding profits we conclude that in most cases both firms are better off with imperfect information than with perfect information, which contributes to explaining firms’ incentives to develop cost reduction activities, such as R&D.

Suggested Citation

  • Ricardo Biscaia & Paula Sarmento, 2012. "Spatial Competition and Firms’ Location Decisions under Cost Uncertainty," FEP Working Papers 445, Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto.
    • Handle: RePEc:por:fepwps:445
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.fep.up.pt/investigacao/workingpapers/wp445.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Ricardo Biscaia & Paula Sarmento, 2013. "Location Decisions in a Natural Resource Model of Cournot Competition," FEP Working Papers 509, Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Agglomeration; Imperfect Information;

    JEL classification:

    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
    • R12 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography)

    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:por:fepwps:445. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fepuppt.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.