Oligopoly dynamics with barriers to entry

Jaap H. Abbring () and Jeffrey Campbell ()

No WP-06-29, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Abstract: This paper considers the effects of raising the cost of entry for potential competitors on infinite-horizon Markov- perfect industry dynamics with ongoing demand uncertainty. All entrants serving the model industry incur sunk costs, and exit avoids future fixed costs. We focus on the unique equilibrium with last- in first-out expectations: a firm never exits before a younger rival does. When an industry can support at most two firms, we prove that raising barriers to a second producer’s entry increases the probability that some firm will serve the industry and decreases its long-run entry and exit rates. In numerical examples with more than two firms, imposing a barrier to entry stabilizes industry structure.

Keywords: Oligopolies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-com, nep-cse, nep-ent, nep-ind, nep-mic and nep-tid
Date: Written 2006
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