Université de Lausanne
Ecole des HEC
Département d'économétrie et d'économie politique
Wednesday April 8, 2009, 13:00
Extranef, Dorigny, room 126
(LERNA/CNRS,
Toulouse School of Economics, France)
Potential Competitorsin Preemption Games
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to study the adoption of a new technology by a
firm when the competitor comes into play at a random date that can be seen as
her birth date. The presence of a competitor is thus only revealed when she
invests. We show that there exists a unique Bayesian equilibrium that can be
split into three stages. No firm will invest before a threshold T1 even if she
is born before. After another threshold T2 that is strictly less than the date
that maximizes the expected payoff function, any firm immediately invests at
birth. In between, the equilibrium is in mixed strategies. On [T1, T2], newborn
firms compete with firms that were born earlier.
Web site of the seminar (with paper online): http://www.hec.unil.ch/deep/evenements-english/e-sem-all-2008-09.htm