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The decision oriented theory of the public firm (Feng, Friedrich 2013) becomes extended. The authors consider that sometimes public firms compete horizontally as well. This can be due to competition among the public owners (e.g. municipalities) considering location choices for public firms they own, or public firms competing against each other. We mention some results related to the first type of competition and we refer to how the literature on location choices under oligopolic conditions could be referred to within the framework of our basic approach. One approach by Cornes and Hartley (2001) also allows modelling the establishment of joint ventures and their location choices. The basic model of the public firm is used to provide insight into the location choices of a trust of public firms. The trust exhibits coordination at three levels via the politically-oriented decision-making body of the public owner, the trust's headquarters and subsidiary public firms. The resulting model illustrates the interplay of different decisionmakers and the effects of the coordinating activities. The first attempts to formulate a public firm decision-making oriented location theory exist.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The audit market for large public companies is an oligopoly, with the largest firms auditing the vast majority of public companies and smaller firms facing significant barriers to entry into the market. Mergers among the largest firms in the 1980s and 1990s and the dissolution of Arthur Andersen in 2002 significantly increased concentration among the largest firms, known as the "Big 4." These four firms currently audit over 78 percent of all U.S. public companies and 99 percent of all public company sales. This consolidation and the resulting concentration have raised a number of concerns. To address them, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 mandated that GAO study (1) the factors contributing to the mergers; (2) the implications of consolidation on competition and client choice, audit fees, audit quality, and auditor independence; (3) the impact of consolidation on capital formation and securities markets; and (4) barriers to entry faced by smaller accounting firms in competing with the largest firms for large public company audits."

AbstractThis paper makes comparative statics in a model in which oligopolistic and monopolistically competitive firms that are heterogeneous in productivity compete. We demonstrate that (i) entry of oligopolistic incumbents, (ii) reduction in entry cost of monopolistically competitive entrants, and (iii) market size expansion improve the average productivity in the whole economy. However, (i) and (iii) raise welfare, but (ii) may lower welfare because of the presence of oligopolistic firms.

The impact of the new media on the old is described and competition among the various media as well. It is concluded that the FCC's discouragement of cross-channel affiliation seems fo induce adjustments which are likely to improve the media. An anti-affiliation rule may aggravate the older media's sensitivity to organized groups, especially in the short run. But in newspaper publishing, long run adjustments in price and quality, developing the newspaper's strong points, seem to have helped the printed medium to hold its ovn. And though TV's sharp blows on radio and the movies may well continue, them ~s some evidence that competitive adjustments may eventually help stabilize the older media. Indeed many (though not all) adjustments older media have made to their newer rivals, appear to enhance the adequacy of the press in their own right. Economic stability of media, lastly, may facilitate realization of certain theoretical benefits of separate ownership. It follows that FCC would do well to reconsider the meaning of its Newspaper Rule today and also ways of applying it to movie producers and theater owners. (AA).

Governments situated on the same level of a multi-level governmental system compete with each other as well as with those placed higher or lower. This paper is concerned with horizontal competition only. It discusses both competition based on the mobility of agents (individuals, business firms, or factors) and competition related to the circulation of information. With regard to the first kind, it focuses on the capacity that governments keep to decide their policies and compete in spite of the mobility of agents. Some attention is alsogiven to the implications of some non-standard assumptions about the underlying political setup. The discussion of information-based competition includes that of "laboratory federalism" (whether decentralization favours innovation) and of "yardstick competition" (what are the effects of comparisons of governments' comparative performance across jurisdictions). Somequestions pertaining to the relationship between the different forms of horizontal competition and to their normative and empirical dimensions are addressed briefly.