Evolutionary Stability in Asymmetric Oligopoly

Wolfgang Leininger, Hamed Markazi Moghadam
2014 Social Science Research Network  
A Non-Walrasian Result Bibliografi sche Informationen der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der deutschen Nationalbibliografi e; detaillierte bibliografi sche Daten sind im Internet über: http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufb ar. Abstract It is a very well-known result that in terms of evolutionary stability the long-run outcome of a Cournot oligopoly market with fi nitely many fi rms approaches the perfectly competitive Walrasian market outcome
more » ... ndo, 1997) . However, in this paper we show that an asymmetric structure in the cost functions of fi rms 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 (diff erent) marginal cost. We apply a symmetrization technique in order to transform the game with asymmetric fi rms into a symmetric oligopoly game and then extend Schaff er's defi nition (1988) of a fi nite 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. JEL Classifi cation: C72, C73, D43, L13
doi:10.2139/ssrn.2561214 fatcat:r3o65lm2mjgftiqxspgom7emwe