I survey the literature post Ledyard (Handbook of Experimental Economics, ed. by J. Kagel, A. Roth, Chap. 2, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1995) on three related issues in linear public goods experiments: (1) conditional cooperation; (2) the role of costly monetary punishments in sustaining cooperation and (3) the sustenance of cooperation via means other than such punishments. Many participants in laboratory public goods experiments are “conditional cooperators” whose contributions to the public good are positively correlated with their beliefs about the average group contribution. Conditional cooperators are often able to sustain high contributions to the public good through costly monetary punishment of free-riders but also by other mechanisms such as expressions of disapproval, advice giving and assortative matching.

https://www.cepr.org/sites/default/files/events/papers/796_CHAUDHURI.pdf

Sustaining cooperation in laboratory public goods experiments: a selective survey of the literature

We study a contest with multiple (not necessarily equal) prizes. Contestants have private information about an ability parameter that affects their costs of bidding. The contestant with the highest bid wins the first prize, the contestant with the second-highest bid wins the second prize, and so on until all the prizes are allocated. All contestants incur their respective costs of bidding. The contest's designer maximizes the expected sum of bids. Our main results are: 1) We display bidding equlibria for any number of contestants having linear, convex or concave cost functions, and for any distribution of abilities. 2) If the cost functions are linear or concave, then, no matter what the distribution of abilities is, it is optimal for the designer to allocate the entire prize sum to a single ''first'' prize. 3) We give a necessary and sufficient conditions ensuring that several prizes are optimal if contestants have a convex cost function.

The Optimal Allocation of Prizes in Contests

This paper examines competitive price discrimination with horizontal and vertical taste differences. Consumers with higher valuations for quality are assumed to have stronger brand preferences. Two models are considered: a standard competitive price discrimination model in which consumers observe all prices; and an "add-on pricing" game in which add-on prices are naturally unobserved and firms may advertise a base good at a low price in hopes of selling add-ons at high unadvertised prices. In the standard game price discrimination is self-reinforcing: the model sometimes has both equilibria in which the firms practice price discrimination and equilibria in which they do not. The analysis of the add-on pricing game focuses on the Chicago-school argument that profits earned on add-ons will be competed away via lower prices for advertised goods. A conclusion is that add-on practices can raise equilibrium profits by creating an adverse selection problem that makes price-cutting unappealing. Although profitable when jointly adopted, using add-on pricing is not individually rational in a simple extension with endogenous advertising practices and costless advertising. Several models that could account for add-on pricing are discussed.

/pdf/a-model-of-add-on-pricing-1z3e6pmdmd.pdf

A Model of Add-On Pricing

This chapter surveys the developments in price discrimination theory as it applies to imperfectly competitive markets. Broad themes and conclusions are discussed in the areas of first-, second- and third-degree price discrimination, pricing under demand uncertainty, bundling and behavior-based discrimination.

Chapter 34 Price Discrimination and Competition

We analyze the effects of competition on price dispersion in the airline industry, using panel data from 1993:Q1 through 2006:Q3. Competition has a negative effect on price dispersion, in line with the textbook treatment of price discrimination. This effect is pronounced for routes with consumers characterized by relatively heterogeneous elasticities of demand. On routes with a homogeneous customer base, the effects of competition on price dispersion are smaller. Our results contrast with those of Borenstein and Rose, who found that price dispersion increases with competition. We reconcile the different results by showing that the cross‐sectional estimator suffers from omitted‐variable bias.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/597328

Does Competition Reduce Price Dispersion? New Evidence from the Airline Industry

The paper analyses the existence of pure strategy Nash equilibrium in price competition (or Bertrand equilibrium) in a homogeneous product market when costs are strictly convex and proves that if output is demand determined such equilibrium always exists. This paper also characterises such equilibria and shows that if firms are identical such equilibria are necessarily non-unique. However for firms with asymmetric costs it can be unique or non-unique.

On the existence of pure strategy Bertrand equilibrium

Comparing Cournot and Bertrand in a Homogeneous Product Market

Corruption in delegated public procurement auctions

On Stackelberg games in a homogeneous product market

In this paper we analyse the effects of third-degree price discrimination on output, profit and welfare in a symmetric cost duopoly. We provide sufficient conditions for output, profit and welfare to be higher (or lower) under third-degree price discrimination in a duopoly, compared with a uniform price regime. Comparing our findings with the traditional results on monopoly price discrimination, we show that the output and profit effects under duopoly price discrimination are very different from those under the monopoly case. However, the welfare effects are very similar.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/manc_490.pdf?abstractid=886415&mirid=1&type=2

Krishnendu Ghosh Dastidar

Papers

On the existence of pure strategy Bertrand equilibrium

Comparing Cournot and Bertrand in a Homogeneous Product Market

Corruption in delegated public procurement auctions

On Stackelberg games in a homogeneous product market

On third-degree price discrimination in oligopoly*