Moral Hazard, Bertrand Competition, and Natural Monopoly

Guha, Brishti

Moral Hazard, Bertrand Competition, and Natural Monopoly

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In the traditional model of Bertrand price competition among symmetric firms, there is no restriction on the number of firms that are active in equilibrium. A symmetric equilibrium exists with the different firms sharing the market. I show that this does not hold if we preserve the symmetry between firms but introduce moral hazard with a customer-sensitive probability of exposure; competition necessarily results in a natural monopoly with only one active firm. Sequential price announcements and early adoption are some equilibrium selection mechanisms that help to pin down the identity of the natural monopolist. If we modify the standard Bertrand assumptions to introduce decreasing returns to scale, a natural oligopoly will emerge instead of a natural monopoly. The insights of the basic model are robust to many extensions.

Keywords: Bertrand competition; active firms; moral hazard; natural monopoly (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 D43 D82 L11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-04-26
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)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Moral hazard, Bertrand competition and natural monopoly (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:70966

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