Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-xfwgj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-28T22:20:30.047Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Battles for market share: incomplete information, aggressive strategic pricing, and competitive dynamics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2013

Get access

Summary

In the last five years, economists have begun to apply the theory of games of incomplete information in extensive form to problems of industrial competition. As a result, we are beginning to get a theoretical handle on some aspects of the rich variety of behavior that marks real strategic interactions but that has previously resisted analysis. For example, the only theoretically consistent analyses of predatory pricing available five years ago indicated that such behavior was pointless and should be presumed to be rare; now we have several distinct models pointing in the opposite direction. These not only formalize and justify arguments for predation that had previously been put forward by business people, lawyers, and students of industrial practice; they also provide subtle new insights that call into question both prevailing public policy and legal standards and various suggestions for their reform. In a similar fashion, we now have models offering strategic, information-based explanations for such phenomena as price wars, the use of apparently uninformative advertising, limit pricing, patterns of implicit cooperation and collusion, the breakdown of bargaining and delays of agreement, the use of warranties and service contracts, the form of pricing chosen by oligopolists, the nature of contracts between suppliers and customers, and the adoption of various institutions for exchange: almost all of this was unavailable five years ago.

Type
Chapter
Information
Advances in Economic Theory
Fifth World Congress
, pp. 157 - 196
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×