Two are Few and Four are Many: Number Effects in Experimental Oligopolies

Steffen Huck, Hans-Theo Normann () and Jörg Oechssler

Bonn Econ Discussion Papers from University of Bonn, Germany

Abstract: In this paper we investigate how the competitiveness of Cournot markets varies with the number of firms in an industry. We review previous Cournot experiments in the literature. Additionally, we conduct a new series of experiments studying oligopolies with two, three, four, and five firms in a unified frame. With two firms we find some collusion. Three-firm oligopolies tend to produce outputs at the Nash level. Markets with four or five firms are never collusive and typically settle at or above the Cournot outcome. Some of those markets are actually quite competitive with outputs close to the Walrasian outcome.

Keywords: Cournot markets; oligopolies; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L13 C92 C72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-mic
Date: Written
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://web.bgse.uni-bonn.de/pub/RePEc/bon/bonedp/bgse12_2001.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Two are few and four are many: number effects in experimental oligopolies (2004)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bon:bonedp:bgse12_2001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bonn Econ Discussion Papers from University of Bonn, Germany
Address: Bonn Graduate School of Economics, University of Bonn, Adenauerallee 24 - 26, 53113 Bonn, Germany
Series data maintained by Daniel Park ().