Search Results (26)

Based on different carbon quota trading mechanisms, the price and emission reduction strategies of oligopoly manufacturers in the low-carbon market and the government carbon quota mechanism are considered. A dynamic game evolution model of the two oligopoly manufacturers with competitive relations is established. The stability of the equilibrium point of the game model, the price adjustment speed of the decision variable, the impact of carbon emission reduction investment, and the government carbon quota on the system are discussed. Through nonlinear dynamics research, it is found that the advantage of the grandfathering method is that it is conducive to maintaining market stability when the government’s carbon quota decision changes; the advantage of the benchmarking method is that when manufacturers formulate price adjustment strategies, the benchmarking method carbon quota mechanism has a stronger stability range for the market, the manufacturer’s profit price adjustment speed is positively correlated, and the government carbon quota decision and emission reduction investment are also positively correlated. Decision makers need to choose appropriate carbon quota mechanisms and manufacturers’ emission reduction strategies according to actual market changes to maintain supply chain stability. Full article

This paper introduces a dynamic mechanism design tailored for uncertain environments where incentive schemes are challenged by the inability to observe players’ actions, known as moral hazard. In these scenarios, the system operates as a Markov game where outcomes depend on both the state of payouts and players’ actions. Moral hazard and adverse selection further complicate decision-making. The proposed mechanism aims to incentivize players to truthfully reveal their states while maximizing their expected payoffs. This is achieved through players’ best-reply strategies, ensuring truthful state revelation despite moral hazard. The revelation principle, a core concept in mechanism design, is applied to models with both moral hazard and adverse selection, facilitating optimal reward structure identification. The research holds significant practical implications, addressing the challenge of designing reward structures for multiplayer Markov games with hidden actions. By utilizing dynamic mechanism design, researchers and practitioners can optimize incentive schemes in complex, uncertain environments affected by moral hazard. To demonstrate the approach, the paper includes a numerical example of solving an oligopoly problem. Oligopolies, with a few dominant market players, exhibit complex dynamics where individual actions impact market outcomes significantly. Using the dynamic mechanism design framework, the paper shows how to construct optimal reward structures that align players’ incentives with desirable market outcomes, mitigating moral hazard and adverse selection effects. This framework is crucial for optimizing incentive schemes in multiplayer Markov games, providing a robust approach to handling the intricacies of moral hazard and adverse selection. By leveraging this design, the research contributes to the literature by offering a method to construct effective reward structures even in complex and uncertain environments. The numerical example of oligopolies illustrates the practical application and effectiveness of this dynamic mechanism design. Full article

An n-person cooperative oligopoly is considered without product differentiation. It is assumed that the firms know the unit price function but have no access to the cost functions of the competitors. From market data, they have information about the industry output. The firms want to find the output levels that guarantee maximum industry profit. First, the existence of a unique maximizer is proven, which the firms cannot determine directly because of the lack of the knowledge of the cost functions. Instead, a dynamic model is constructed, which is asymptotically stable under realistic conditions, and the state trajectories converge to the optimum output levels of the firms. Three models are constructed: first, no time delay is assumed; second, information delay is considered for the firms on the industry output; and third, in addition, information delay is also assumed about the firms’ own output levels. The stability of the resulting no-delay, one-delay, and two-delay dynamics is examined. Full article

We investigate the role and performance of imitative behavior in a class of quantity-setting, Cournot games. Within a framework of evolutionary competition between rational, myopic best-response and imitation heuristics with differential heuristics’ costs, we found that the equilibrium stability depends on the sign of the cost differential between the unstable heuristic (Cournot best-response) and the stable one (imitation) and on the intensity of the evolutionary pressure. When this cost differential is positive (i.e., imitation is relatively cheaper vis a vis Cournot), most firms use this heuristic and the Cournot equilibrium is stabilized for market sizes for which it was unstable under Cournot homogeneous learning. However, as the number of firms increases $(n=7)$, instability eventually sets in. When the cost differential is negative (imitation is more expensive than Cournot), complicated quantity fluctuations, along with the co-existence of heuristics, arise already for the triopoly game. Full article

In this paper, we address the problem of fair sharing of the total value of a crowd-sourced network system between major participants (founders) and minor participants (crowd) using cooperative game theory. We use the framework of a Shapley allocation which is regarded as a fundamental method of computing the fair share of all participants in a cooperative game when the values of all possible coalitions could be quantified. To quantify the value of all coalitions, we define a class of value functions for crowd-sourced systems which capture the contributions of the founders and the crowd plausibly and derive closed-form expressions for Shapley allocations to both. These value functions are defined for different scenarios, such as the presence of oligopolies or geographic spread of the crowd, taking network effects, including Metcalfe’s law, into account. A key result we obtain is that under quite general conditions, the crowd participants are collectively owed a share between $\frac{1}{2}$ and $\frac{2}{3}$ of the total value of the crowd-sourced system. We close with an empirical analysis demonstrating the consistency of our results with the compensation offered to the crowd participants in some public internet content sharing companies. Full article

The import demand for energy resources, including liquefied natural gas (LNG), has been steadily increasing in the Asia-Pacific region. Australia, the Middle East (Qatar), the Russian Federation, and the U.S. are the major players who compete strategically to capture this ever-growing market for LNG. The objective of this paper is to examine the potential for Canada’s entry into this market as another LNG exporter and what impact that can have on the existing suppliers. Using a game-theoretic LNG export competition model, we explore the conditions under which Canada can make a profitable entry. We also investigate the effect of Canada’s entry on the profitability of the four incumbent exporters. Employing a multi-leader Stackelberg model, we found that Canada’s entry could be a Pareto superior outcome under certain conditions because it benefits all competing firms and consumers. Further, Canada’s entry into the LNG export market always helps the low-cost incumbent firms by increasing their output and profit. However, the high-cost incumbent firms’ output falls, while their profit may increase or decrease depending on the unit cost and market size parameters. With differential export costs between Canada and the U.S., the latter has an incentive to act strategically to affect the entrance of the former. Full article

Coopetition means that in economic interactions, both competition and cooperation are presented in the same time. We built and investigated analytically and numerically game theoretic models of coopetition in normal form and in the form of characteristic function. The basic model in normal form reflects competition between firms in Cournot oligopoly and their cooperation in mutually profitable activities such as marketing, R&D, and environmental protection. Each firm divides its resource between competition and cooperation. In the model in normal form we study Nash and Stackelberg settings and compare the results. In cooperative setting we consider Neumann–Morgenstern, Petrosyan–Zaccour, and Gromova–Petrosyan versions of characteristic functions and calculate the respective Shapley values. The payoffs in all cases are compared, and the respective conclusions about the relative efficiency of different ways of organization for separate agents and the whole society are made. Full article

We built and investigated analytically and numerically a differential game model of Cournot oligopoly with consideration of pollution for the general case and the case of symmetrical agents. We conducted a comparative analysis of selfish agents’ behavior (a differential game in normal form), their hierarchical organization (differential Stackelberg games), and cooperation (optimal control problem) using individual and collective indices of relative efficiency. The same analysis wasperformed for the models with the green effect when players chose both output volumes and environmental protection efforts. We used the Pontryagin maximum principle for analytical investigation and the method of qualitatively representative scenarios in simulation modeling for numerical calculations. This method allows for reducing the number of computer simulations, providing sufficient precision. As a result of the comparative analysis, systems of collective and individual preferences were obtained. Full article

The sequential pricing game model is an approach that can be effectively used to solve the problem with multi-oligopoly pricing mechanisms in raw material supply chains. However, the existing sequential pricing mechanism does not fully consider constraints such as the purchase volume of downstream firms and the change information of each parameter, which leads to the pricing mechanism being detached from the real market. According to the concept of the sequential pricing game model being used among multi-oligopolies under constraints, we constructed the constrained sequential pricing game model by incorporating the parameters related to the product demand function, marginal production cost, dominant coefficient, following coefficient, and agreed minimum purchase volume as constraints, and the model was converted into a nonlinear bilevel programming model to facilitate model solving. Furthermore, we provided the analytical solution formulas for six special cases, thus making the model more similar to the real market. In addition, the effects of the agreed minimum purchase volume and the dominant and following coefficients on the equilibrium quoted prices and profits of the firms were analyzed. The results of the numerical simulation show that the constrained sequential pricing game model is more effective than the unconstrained sequential pricing game model in solving the problem with the multi-oligopoly pricing mechanism, which means that it can be used to establish a better pricing mechanism and provide a more reasonable and scientific basis for market operation and policymakers in solving practical problems. Full article

The subject of this study is an oligopolistic market in which three firms operate in an environment of quantitative competition known as the Cournot oligopoly model. Firms and their production are differentiated, which brings the theoretical model closer to real market conditions. The main objective was to expand the Cournot duopoly and add another firm, resulting in an oligopolistic market structure assuming a partially differentiated production and coalition strategy between two firms. This article contains an oligopolistic model specifically designed for three different types of expectations, and has been applied to find and verify the stability of the net equilibrium of oligopolists. The market of telecommunication operators in Slovakia was selected as a real market case with accessible data on an oligopoly with three companies and partial differentiation. There are studies in which the authors limit their considerations to a certain number of repetitions of oligopolistic games. An infinite time interval is considered here. Three types of future expectations were considered: a simple dynamic model (or naïve expectations) in which the oligopolist assumes that its competitors will behave in the future based on their response functions, an adaptive expectations model in which the oligopolist considers a weighted average of the quantities offered by its competitors, and real expectations in which firms behave as rational players and do not have complete information about demand and offer output based on expected marginal profit. While the presented model proved to be stable under naïve and adaptive expectations, no stable equilibrium was found under real expectations and further results indicate a chaotic behavior. Full article

In this paper, we deal with the renowned problem of plastic pollution caused by food consumption and its conservation. Specifically, we consider the producer/reseller decision problem of industrial organizations in conditions of perfect competition within small oligopoly clusters. Indeed, very often, one major sustainability problem is that the presence of direct competitors in the same market determines entrepreneurship choices which lower production costs and packaging costs at the expense of the environment and public health. For this purpose, in order to show economic scenarios in which the respect and preservation of the environment and natural resources are quantitatively compatible with profits and economic growth, we present a provisional coopetitive model of the strategic interaction of two food enterprises, in direct duopoly competition, through investments in sustainable-packaging technologies. The macroeconomic goal is to propose possible actions to reduce carbon footprints and the inflow of plastics to the marine environment, following the environmental targets established by the United Nations, also in the presence of direct perfect oligopolistic competition in the same market. From a microeconomic point of view, we assume the existence of two competitors selling a very similar type of food in the same market; therefore, within a competitive interaction, we adopt a classic “Cournot duopoly” core upon which we define a parametric game, namely, a coopetitive game, together with its possible dynamical scenarios and solutions. We should notice that beyond the parameter arising from the cooperation construct, we introduce a matrix of stochastic variables, which we can also consider as the state of the world. Moreover, we numerically examine one possible state of the world to exemplify our model proposal. We determine, analytically and graphically, the optimal investment in the cooperative strategy, the purely coopetitive solution and some super-cooperative solutions. The cooperative strategy represents the common investment chosen to acquire advanced green technologies for innovative packaging, while the fourth component of any solution in the strategy space represents the state of the world at the end of the coopetitive process in which, finally, we can see the profits and costs deriving from the adoption of the green technologies. Full article

This paper analyzes the environmental tax’s effect on manufacturers’ choice of low-carbon technology in competitive supply chains. The existing studies only consider a single oligopoly enterprise and ignore the competition between supply chains. Few papers study the manufacturer’s technology choice under the carbon tax policy in the competitive supply chains, especially investigating the factors influencing the technology choice, including the market volume, and technology carbon emission reduction efficiency because different industry sectors have their distinctive carbon emissions reduction efficiencies and facing the different market volume. The study adopts a game theoretical approach, including the three-level supply chain consisting of the regulator, the manufacturers, and the retailers. A high carbon tax does not always help firms choose low-carbon technology. However, the monotonous effect of the carbon tax on manufacturer technology selection is no longer valid if the market volume and the carbon-reducing efficiency are considered. When the market volume is large, the regulator can set a high carbon tax to induce the manufacturers to choose low-carbon technology. We identify cases where the manufacturers are caught in a prisoner’s dilemma. When the market volume is small, and the carbon-reducing efficiency is high, the competitive manufacturers adopt the common technology. However, if the regulator increases the carbon tax, the manufacturers acquire the differential technology strategic choice, which is the Pareto optimal. We also extend the base model to the imperfect substitutable Cournot model and the Bertrand model to check the robustness and find our main results still hold in these extensions. Full article

Whether third-degree price discrimination improves or damages social welfare has always been a hot topic for scholars of economics. At present, research studies on the impact of third-degree price discrimination on welfare have not been carried out under asymmetric price competition. To this end, we studied this problem. In the research process, we divided consumers into two market segments by setting different travel costs based on the Hotelling model; at the same time, we considered three scenarios in which both firms engage in uniform pricing, both engage in price discrimination, and price discrimination vs. uniform pricing, and some intriguing findings and conclusions that differ from the previous studies were obtained through game analysis: (1) compared with two symmetric price games, the total output effect of each firm is unchanged, but the total social welfare is reduced, and as the size of the strong market increases, the reduction effect of total social welfare increases first and then decreases; (2) from local social welfare analysis, although the output of the firm adopting price discrimination remains unchanged, it can produce more producer surplus, consumer surplus and social welfare third-degree; (3) while the firm that uses uniform pricing is at a disadvantage in competition, the local social welfare created by it is decreased, and the reduction effect of social welfare will increase first and then decrease as the increase of the size of the strong market occurs. These conclusions reveal in an oligopoly market why enterprises always choose price discrimination and the government acquiesces in the existence of price discrimination. Full article

We investigate why a firm might purposefully hire a chief executive officer (CEO) who under- or over-estimates the degree of substitutability between competing products. This counterintuitive result arises in imperfect competition because CEO bias can affect rival behavior and the intensity of competition. We lay out the conditions under which it is profitable for owners to hire biased managers. Our work shows that a universal policy that effectively eliminates such biases need not improve social welfare. Full article

The paper analyzes a two-stage oligopoly game of semi-collusion in production described by a system with a symmetric structure. We examine the local stability of a Nash equilibrium and the presence of bifurcations. We discover that the model is capable of exhibiting extremely complicated dynamic behaviors. Full article