Research Details

Abstract

We study industries where the price that a firm sets serves as an investment into lower cost or higher demand. We assess the welfare implications of the ensuing competition for the market using analytical and numerical approaches to compare the equilibria of a learning-by-doing model to the first-best planner solution. We show that dynamic competition leads to low deadweight loss. This cannot be attributed to similarity between the equilibria and the planner solution. Instead, we show how learning-by-doing causes the various contributions to deadweight loss to either be small or partly offset each other.

Type

Article

Author(s)

David Besanko, Ulrich Doraszelski, Yaroslav Kryukov

Date Published

2019

Citations

Besanko, David, Ulrich Doraszelski, and Yaroslav Kryukov. 2019. Is Dynamic Competition Socially Beneficial? The Case of Price as Investment. American Economic Review.(9): 3339-3364.