Spatial Economics Seminar Amsterdam

Speaker(s)
Pim Heijnen (University of Groningen)
Date
Monday, 20 January 2014
Location
Amsterdam

This paper extends Hotelling’s model of price competition with quadratic transportation costs from a line to graphs. We 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. We show that the existence result of D’Aspremont et al. (1979) does not extend to simple star graphs and we 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. Joint with Adriaan R. Soetevent.