Technical Change and Profits: The Prisoner's Dilemma

Jeffrey Baldani and Thomas Michl
Additional contact information
Jeffrey Baldani: Department of Economics, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY 13346-1398; Tel: (315) 228-7519; jbaldani@mail.colgate.edu

Review of Radical Political Economics, 2000, vol. 32, issue 1, 104-118

Abstract: We examine the implications of biased-lower marginal, but higher fixed, cost-technical change in a model of oligopoly. Such changes create an incentive for firms to adopt new technologies in a quest for increased output, market share, and profits. These individual incentives lead to a prisoner's dilemma: the increase in firms' outputs causes market price to fall. The analysis specifies conditions under which the decrease in price will result in lower profits for both the individual firms and the industry as a whole.

Keywords: Oligopoly; Marx; Technology; Prisoner's Dilemma (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://rrp.sagepub.com/content/32/1/104.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:reorpe:v:32:y:2000:i:1:p:104-118

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Radical Political Economics from Union for Radical Political Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().