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Abstract
In their seminal paper, Grossman, G. M., and C. Shapiro. 1984. "Informative Advertising with Differentiated Products." The Review of Economic Studies 51: 63–81 assume that it is not profitable for a firm to deviate to the supercompetitive price of Salop, S. C. 1979. "Monopolistic Competition with outside Goods." The Bell Journal of Economics 10: 141–56. In this note, it is shown that this assumption is violated if, roughly, each firm reaches less than half of all consumers unless it is a duopoly. This implies that most of the simulations in Grossman, G. M., and C. Shapiro. 1984. "Informative Advertising with Differentiated Products." The Review of Economic Studies 51: 63–81 are not actually equilibria. More importantly, this implies that for their equilibrium to exist nearly all consumers must receive at least one ad. For example, with just four firms in the market, at least 96% of the consumers must receive at least one ad, and this percentage increases with the number of firms in the market.

Abstract Compared with the social optimum, a monopolist usually sells too little. This result seemingly includes the case of a lab that licences its patented cost innovation: Katz and Shapiro (1986) find 'conditions under which [the lab] will issue fewer than the socially optimal number of licences.' However, I find instead that its incentives can be socially too high; the monopoly seller may sell too much. For example, it can be profit maximizing to sell several licences, while it is socially optimal that none is sold.

A different approach is introduced to determine the value of an information‐sharing agreement: the measure of risk aversion/loving. This approach reveals the relationship between information‐sharing models and the risk literature. It also allows uncertainty regarding the slope of a firm's own demand function to be examined which previous work eschews. The results suggest that the incentive to reveal information is more prevalent than previously thought: firms prefer to commit to reveal private valued information in both quantity and price competition. This differs from previous work where the incentive to commit depended on the type of competition.

We relax the standard assumption in the strategic trade policy literature that governments possess complete information about the economy. Assuming instead that governments must obtain information from firms, we examine firms' incentive to disclose information to the governments in the Brander-Spencer setting. With quantity competition, we find firms disclosing both demand and cost information, thereby justifying the literature's omniscient-government assumption. With price competition, however, firms have no incentives to disclose demand or cost information, so governments remain uninformed. Further, with quantity competition and unknown demand, governments are caught in an informational prisoner's dilemma.

Abstract.  Traditional modelling of mergers has the merged firms (insiders) cooperate and maximize joint profits. This approach has several unappealing results in quantity‐setting games, for example, mergers typically are not profitable for insiders, but are profitable for non‐merging firms (outsiders). We take a different approach and allow for a parent company that can play each insider off one another. In quantity‐setting games, with our approach mergers are profitable for insiders, unprofitable for outsiders, socially beneficial, and involve (in a non‐monopolizing merger) a small number of firms. Finally, we find that the optimal strategy depends on whether firms compete in quantity or prices. JEL classification: L000