EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Competing for Contacts: Network Competition, Trade Intermediation and Fragmented Duopoly

Dimitra Petropoulou ()

No 371, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: A two-sided, pair-wise matching model is developed to analyse the strategic interaction between two information intermediaries who compete in commission rates and network size, giving rise to a fragmented duopoly market structure. The model suggests that network competition between information intermediaries has a distinctive market structure, where intermediaries are monopolist service providers to some contacts but duopolists over contacts they share in their network overlap. The intermediaries` inability to price discriminate between the competitive and non-competitive market segments, gives rise to an undercutting game, which has no pure strategy Nash equilibrium. The incentive to randomise commission rates yields a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium. Finally, competition is affected by the technology of network development. The analysis shows that either a monopoly or a fragmented duopoly can prevail in equilibrium, depending on the network-building technology. Under convexity assumptions, both intermediaries invest in a network and compete over common matches, while randomising commission rates. In contrast, linear network development costs can only give rise to a monopolistic outcome.

Keywords: International Trade; Pairwise Matching; Information Cost; Intermediation; Networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D43 D82 D83 F10 L10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-cse, nep-int, nep-mic and nep-net
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:79b5a4c3-3fed-4870-89c6-d996d7da868c (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Competing for Contacts: Network Competition, Trade Intermediation and Fragmented Duopoly (2008) Downloads
Working Paper: Competing for contacts: network competition, trade intermediation and fragmented duopoly (2008) Downloads
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:oxf:wpaper:371

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Pouliquen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:371