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Investment and Market Dominance

2001; Wiley; Volume: 32; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2696395

1756-2171

Susan Athey, Armin Schmutzler,

Digital Platforms and Economics

We analyze a model of oligopolistic competition with ongoing investment.Special cases include incremental investment, patent races, learning by doing, and network externalities.We investigate circumstances under which a firm with low costs or high quality will extend its initial lead through investments.To this end, we derive a new comparative statics result for general games with strategic substitutes, which applies to our investment game.Finally, we highlight plausible countervailing effects that arise when investments of leaders are less effective than those of laggards, or in dynamic games when firms are sufficiently patient.