Social Welfare under Oligopoly: Does the Strengthening of Competition in Production Increase Consumers' Well-Being?

Authors

  • Mathieu Parenti European Centre for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics (ECARES)
  • Alexander V. Sidorov Sobolev Institute of Mathematics; Novosibirsk State University
  • Jacques-Fran¸cois Thisse CORE-Universit´e Catholique de Louvain

Abstract

The paper studies the detailed comparison of the Social welfare (indirect utility) under three types of imperfect competition in a general equilibrium model: quantity oligopoly (Cournot), price oligopoly (Bertrand) and monopolistic competition (Chamberlin). The folk wisdom implies that an increasing toughness of competition in sequence Cournot-Bertrand-Chamberlin results in increasing of consumers' welfare (indirect utility). We show that this is not true in general. This is accomplished in a simple general equilibrium model where consumers are endowed with separable preferences. We find the sufficient condition in terms of the representative consumer preference providing the “intuitive” behavior of the indirect utility and show that this condition satisfy the classes of utility functions, which are commonly used in examples (e.g., CES, CARA and HARA). Moreover, we provide a series of numerical examples (and analytically verifiable conditions as well), which illustrate that violation of this condition may results in “counter-intuitive” behavior of indirect utility, when the weakest level of competition (Cournot) provides the highest amount of the consumer's welfare.

Keywords:

Cournot competition, Bertrand competition, free entry, Lerner index, indirect utility

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Behrens, K. and Y. Murata, (2007). General equilibrium models of monopolistic competition: A new approach. Journal of Economic Theory, 136, 776–787.

d’Aspremont, C., R. Dos Santos Ferreira and L.-A. Grard-Varet (1996). On the Dixit-Stiglitz model of monopolistic competition. American Economic Review, 86, 623–629.

Dhingra, S. and J. Morrow (2014). Monopolistic Competition and Optimum Product Diversity Under Firm Heterogeneity, mimeo.

Gabszewicz, J. and J.-P. Vial (1972). Oligopoly la Cournot in general equilibrium analysis. Journal of Economic Theory, 4, 381–400.

Hart, O. (1985). Imperfect competition in general equilibrium: An overview of recent work. In K.J. Arrow and S. Honkapohja, eds., Frontiers in Economics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Parenti, M., A.V. Sidorov, J.-F. Thisse, and E.V. Zhelobodko (2017). Cournot, Bertrand or Chamberlin: Toward a reconciliation, International Journal of Economic Theory, 13(1), 29–45.

Roberts, J. and H. Sonnenschein (1977). On the foundations of the theory of monopolistic competition. Econometrica 45, 101–113.

Spence, M., (1976). Product Selection, Fixed Costs, and Monopolistic Competition. The Review of Economic Studies, 43 (2), 217–235.

Vives, X. (2001). Oligopoly pricing: Old ideas an new tools. Cambrige, MA; London, England: The MIT Press.

Zhelobodko, E., S. Kokovin, M. Parenti and J.-F. Thisse (2012). Monopolistic competition in general equilibrium: Beyond the constant elasticity of substitution. Econometrica, 80, 2765–2784.

Downloads

Published

2022-04-17

How to Cite

Parenti, M., V. Sidorov, A., & Thisse, J.-F. (2022). Social Welfare under Oligopoly: Does the Strengthening of Competition in Production Increase Consumers’ Well-Being?. Contributions to Game Theory and Management, 10. Retrieved from https://gametheory.spbu.ru/article/view/13262

Issue

Section

Articles