Evolutionary Stability in Asymmetric Oligopoly. A Non-Walrasian Result

Arbeitspapier

It is a very well-known result that in terms of evolutionary stability the long-run outcome of a Cournot oligopoly market with finitely many firms approaches the perfectly competitive Walrasian market outcome (Vega-Redondo, 1997). However, in this paper we show that an asymmetric structure in the cost functions of firms may change the long-run outcome. Contrary to Tanaka (1999) we show that the evolutionarily stable price in an asymmetric Cournot oligopoly needs not equal the marginal cost, it may rather equal a weighted average of (different) marginal cost. We apply a symmetrization technique in order to transform the game with asymmetric firms into a symmetric oligopoly game and then extend Schaffer's definition (1988) of a finite population ESS (FPESS) to this setup. Moreover, we show that the FPESS in this game represents a stochastically stable state of an evolutionary process of imitation with experimentation.

Angaben zum Objekt

• ISBN: 978-3-86788-570-6
• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: Ruhr Economic Papers ; No. 497

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Noncooperative Games ; Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games; Repeated Games ; Market Structure, Pricing, and Design: Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection ; Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
• Thema: Cournot oligopoly ; asymmetry ; finite population evolutionary stable strategy ; stochastic stability

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Leininger, Wolfgang ; Moghadam, Hamed M.
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (RWI)
• (wo): Essen
• (wann): 2014

Weitere Informationen

• DOI: doi:10.4419/86788570
• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/103325
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:45 MEZ