Profit loss in Cournot oligopolies

We compare the aggregate profit achieved at a Cournot equilibrium to the maximum possible, which would be obtained if the suppliers were to collude. We establish a lower bound on the profit of Cournot equilibria in terms of a scalar parameter that captures qualitative properties of the inverse deman...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tsitsiklis, John N, Xu, Yunjian
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Elsevier 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/110536
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2658-8239
Description
Summary:We compare the aggregate profit achieved at a Cournot equilibrium to the maximum possible, which would be obtained if the suppliers were to collude. We establish a lower bound on the profit of Cournot equilibria in terms of a scalar parameter that captures qualitative properties of the inverse demand function and the number of suppliers (or the maximum of the suppliers’ market shares). The lower bounds are tight when the inverse demand function is affine.