Cournot’s Oligopoly Equilibrium under Different Expectations and Differentiated Production

Abstract

The subject of this study is an oligopolistic market in which three firms operate in an environment of quantitative competition known as the Cournot oligopoly model. Firms and their production are differentiated, which brings the theoretical model closer to real market conditions. The main objective was to expand the Cournot duopoly and add another firm, resulting in an oligopolistic market structure assuming a partially differentiated production and coalition strategy between two firms. This article contains an oligopolistic model specifically designed for three different types of expectations, and has been applied to find and verify the stability of the net equilibrium of oligopolists. The market of telecommunication operators in Slovakia was selected as a real market case with accessible data on an oligopoly with three companies and partial differentiation. There are studies in which the authors limit their considerations to a certain number of repetitions of oligopolistic games. An infinite time interval is considered here. Three types of future expectations were considered: a simple dynamic model (or naïve expectations) in which the oligopolist assumes that its competitors will behave in the future based on their response functions, an adaptive expectations model in which the oligopolist considers a weighted average of the quantities offered by its competitors, and real expectations in which firms behave as rational players and do not have complete information about demand and offer output based on expected marginal profit. While the presented model proved to be stable under naïve and adaptive expectations, no stable equilibrium was found under real expectations and further results indicate a chaotic behavior.

Keywords

• Cournot
• equilibrium
• oligopoly
• expectations
• differentiation
• substitutes