The market for melons: Cournot competition with unobservable qualities

Cédric Argenton

No 617, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: Two firms produce different qualities at possibly different, constant marginal costs. They compete in quantities on a market where buyers only observe the average quality supplied. The model is a generalization of the standard Cournot duopoly, which corresponds to the special case where the two qualities are equal. When the quality differential is large, the firms' output levels are not always strategic substitutes. There can be no, or up to three pure-strategy equilibria. Yet, as long as the cost differential is not extreme, there always exists a stable duopolistic equilibrium. In that sense, strategic quantity-setting helps prevent market unraveling.

Keywords: Cournot competition; quality; duopoly; asymmetric information; Nash equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D43 D82 L13 L15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2005-12-30, Revised 2006-05-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ind and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://swopec.hhs.se/hastef/papers/hastef0617.pdf (application/pdf)

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:hhs:hastef:0617

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics The Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box 6501, 113 83 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Helena Lundin ().