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Toward a usable general theory of oligopoly

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This paper propounds a determinate and operational framework for the analysis of the oligopolistic firm's and industry's price-output equilibrium. It emphasizes the implicit collusion and restrained rivalry in the realistic market structure revealed by empirical investigators, and thereby takes a different route from the traditional Cournot-Stackelberg and game-theoretic approaches. It incorporates the multiobjective nature of the firm's decisionmaking, and draws upon nonlinear programming and parametric programming theory to offer a flexible framework to accommodate a wide variety of behavior patterns in such industries. Several simple examples employing fictional data are used to illustrate the models.

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Kuenne, R.E. Toward a usable general theory of oligopoly. De Economist 122, 471–502 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01371994

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