How Efficient Is Dynamic Competition? The Case of Price as Investment
American Economic Review
vol. 109,
no. 9, September 2019
(pp. 3339-64)
Abstract
We study industries where the price that a firm sets serves as an investment into lower cost or higher demand. We assess the welfare implications of the ensuing competition for the market using analytical and numerical approaches to compare the equilibria of a learning-by-doing model to the first-best planner solution. We show that dynamic competition leads to low deadweight loss. This cannot be attributed to similarity between the equilibria and the planner solution. Instead, we show how learning-by-doing causes the various contributions to deadweight loss to either be small or partly offset each other.Citation
Besanko, David, Ulrich Doraszelski, and Yaroslav Kryukov. 2019. "How Efficient Is Dynamic Competition? The Case of Price as Investment." American Economic Review, 109 (9): 3339-64. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20180131Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D21 Firm Behavior: Theory
- D25 Intertemporal Firm Choice: Investment, Capacity, and Financing
- D43 Market Structure, Pricing, and Design: Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection
- D83 Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
- L13 Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets