No abstract

This paper presents a model of media competition with free entry when media operators are financed both from advertisers and customers. The relation between advertising receipts and sales receipts, which are both complementary and antagonist, is different if media operators impose a price or a quantity to advertisers. When consumers dislike advertising, media operators are better off setting an advertising price than an advertising quantity. We establish a relationship between the equilibrium levels (advertising and entry) and the advertising technology. In particular, media operators' profit is not affected by the introduction of advertising when they impose advertising quantities and when advertising exhibits constant returns to scale in the audience size. Under constant or increasing returns to scale in the audience size, we find an excessive level of entry and an insufficient level of advertising.JEL Code: L13, L82.

A patent is not a perfect protection against imitation. It only grants the patentholder the right to sue intruders once they have been identified. This implies that the patentholder must supervise the market and react in case of infringement. His reaction may be to go to court, to settle an agreement or to accept the entry. We investigate how intensive the monitoring effort should be and how it will influence the entry decision. In a simultaneous game we show that even if the penalty paid by the infringer in case of a finding of liability is high, the patentholder may prefer a settlement over a trial. Furthermore, there exist cases in which the likelihood of entry increases with the penalty. In sequential games, we show that regardless of whether the patentholder or the potential infringer plays first, entry occurs comparatively less often than in the simultaneous game.

We analyze the interaction between a reliable source of electricity production and intermittent sources such as wind or solar power. We first characterize the optimal energy mix, emphasizing the availability of the intermittent source as a major parameter for the optimal investment in capacity. We then analyze decentralization through competitive market mechanisms. We show that decentralizing the efficient energy mix requires electricity to be priced contingently on the availability of the intermittent source. By contrast, traditional meters impose uniform pricing, which distorts the optimal mix of energy sources. Decentralizing the efficient energy mix with uniform prices requires either cross-subsidies from the intermittent source to the reliable source of energy or structural integration of the two types of technology.

We propose a simple model of competition between a thermal station and a hydrostation for the production of energy. We show that, despite the static characteristics of the thermal cost function, the thermal output is determined by intertemporal considerations. This results from the scarcity of the water resource which is storable at zero operating cost. We analyze the combination of these technologies in the case of a social planner who maximizes the net total utility from electricity, in the case of private monopoly either regulated or not and, finally, in the case of duopolistic competition in quantities where each private firm operates either a hydraulic power station, or a thermal power station.