PhD Lunch Seminars Rotterdam

Speaker(s)
Adriaan R. Soetevent (UvA)
Date
2011-09-15
Location
Rotterdam

This paper extends Hotelling’s model of price competition with quadratic transportation costs from a line to graphs. I propose an algorithm to calculate firm-level demand for any given graph, conditional on prices and firm locations. These graph models of price competition may lead to spatial discontinuities in firm-level demand. I show that the existence result of D’Aspremont et al. (1979) does not extend to simple star graphs and I conjecture that this non-existence result holds more generally for all graph models with two or more firms that cannot be reduced to a line or circle.