Endogenous Choice of Price or Quantity Contract with Upstream R&D Investment: Linear Pricing and Two-part Tariff Contract with Bargaining

Lee, DongJoon and Choi, Kangsik and Nariu, Tatsuhiko (2016): Endogenous Choice of Price or Quantity Contract with Upstream R&D Investment: Linear Pricing and Two-part Tariff Contract with Bargaining.

Abstract

We investigate the endogenous choice of strategic variable (a price or a quantity) by downstream firms in a two-tier industry in which an upstream firm performs the R&D investment. We show that when the upstream firm offers either linear discriminatory or uniform input price, it is a dominant strategy for each downstream firm to choose Bertrand competition when two products become relatively differentiated. Second, from the viewpoint of downstream firms, we show that Bertrand competition is more efficient than Cournot competition in some boundaries of Cournot equilibrium, which implies that each downstream firm faces a prisoners' dilemma under the Cournot equilibrium. However, when the downstream firms involve in centralized bargaining with an upstream firm to determine the two-part tariff discriminatory (uniform) input pricing contracts, we find that choosing price (quantity) contract is the dominant strategy for downstream firms. In this case, we further show that the level of social welfare is the same regardless of the mode of product market competition (i.e., Bertrand or Cournot).

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Endogenous Choice, Bertrand competition, Cournot competition, Upstream Investment, Bargaining
• Subjects: D - Microeconomics > D4 - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design > D43 - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection; L - Industrial Organization > L1 - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance > L13 - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets; M - Business Administration and Business Economics ; Marketing ; Accounting ; Personnel Economics > M2 - Business Economics > M21 - Business Economics

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