Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Economics Research Institute Study Paper

Volume

34

Publisher

Utah State University Department of Economics

Publication Date

2000

Rights

Copyright for this work is held by the author. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. For more information contact the Institutional Repository Librarian at digitalcommons@usu.edu.

First Page

1

Last Page

24

Abstract

This paper incorporates inventory dynamics into an analysis of market power. A Coumot duopoly model of competition is presented in which firms account for the effects of current choices on their competitors' current actions on future actions (both their own and their competitors '). We show that measures of market power which ignore inventory dynamics produce biased estimates of true market power, although the direction of the bias cannot be theoretically determined. We then apply the model to the beef packing industry using data on cattle stocks and slaughter from 1948-1999. Our estimates suggest that static measures underestimate true market power levels.

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