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Ronald Burt describes the social structural theory of competition that has developed through the last two decades. The contrast between perfect competition and monopoly is replaced with a network model of competition. The basic element in this account is the structural hole: a gap between two individuals with complementary resources or information.

Ronald Burt describes the social structural theory of competition that has developed through the last two decades. The contrast between perfect competition and monopoly is replaced with a network model of competition. The basic element in this account is the structural hole: a gap between two individuals with complementary resources or information. When the two are connected through a third individual as entrepreneur, the gap is filled, creating important advantages for the entrepreneur. Competitive advantage is a matter of access to structural holes in relation to market transactions.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 The Social Structure of Competition -- 2 Formalizing the Argument -- 3 Turning a Profit -- 4 Getting Ahead -- 5 Player-Structure Duality -- 6 Commit and Survive -- 7 Strategic Embedding and Institutional Residue -- Notes -- References -- Index

Researchers’ interest in monopsony has increased in recent years. This article reviews the accumulating evidence that employers have considerable monopsony power. It summarizes the application of this idea to explaining the impact of minimum wages and immigration, in anti-trust, and in understanding how to model the determinants of earnings in matched employer–employee data sets and the implications for inequality and the labor share.

We present a new model of multi-product firms (MPFs) and flexible manufacturing, and explore its implications in partial and general oligopolistic equilibrium. Globalization affects the scale and scope (or intensive margin and intra-firm extensive margin) of MPFs through a competition effect and a demand effect. The model highlights a new source of gains from trade: productivity increases as firms become \"leaner and meaner\", concentrating on their core competence; but also a new source of losses from trade: product variety may fall. Our results also hold under free entry, which allows in addition for adjustment along the traditional inter-firm extensive margin.

Branding decisions are critical for the success of new products. Prior research on branding and brand extension has primarily focused on how branding influences consumers’ perceptions of product quality. However, consumers of conspicuous goods care not only about product quality but also about the profile of its users. For example, high-end consumers prefer an exclusive brand. On the other hand, low-end consumers may find a brand more attractive if high-end consumers use it. In this paper, we analyze how social effects and market structure can influence the branding of conspicuous goods. Consistent with intuition, our theoretical analysis shows that a monopolist would prefer not to use umbrella branding when consumers’ desire for uniqueness is high. By contrast, in a competitive market, umbrella branding is more profitable than individual branding when consumers have a high level of desire for uniqueness. We also identify conditions in which it is optimal for marketers of conspicuous goods to adopt either an individual branding strategy or asymmetric branding strategies. Furthermore, competing firms may offer umbrella branding even when both firms may be better off if they could commit to using individual branding. Finally, we extend the model to consider a market where consumers’ product preference is not related to social status. Again, if consumers are sufficiently snobbish, competing firms earn more profits by adopting an umbrella branding strategy instead of an individual branding strategy. This paper was accepted by J. Miguel Villas-Boas, marketing.

We provide a rationale for the recent burst in the amount of collaborative activities among firms selling complementary products, highlighting factors that may result in a lower profitability for such firms overall. To this end, we examine a game-theoretic model in which firms can collaborate with producers of complementary goods to enhance the quality of the systems formed by their components. Collaboration makes it cheaper to enhance such quality, so building innovation ecosystems results in firms investing more than if collaboration were impossible. In markets reaching saturation, firms are trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma: the greater investments create more value, but this does not translate into greater value capture because the value created relative to competitors does not change. We also examine the (dis)advantages for a firm of having open or closed interfaces for the component it sells when the environment is competitive as well as how this is related to the endogenous emergence of two-sided platforms. This paper was accepted by Bruno Cassiman, business strategy.

We examine a model of Cournot competition with congestion motivated by recent policy to allow commercial sharing of wireless spectrum that is assigned to other users such as government agencies. A key feature of such spectrum is that it is intermittently available because of the incumbent user’s activity. In our model, wireless service providers (SPs) compete for a common pool of customers using their own proprietary (exclusively licensed) bands of spectrum along with access to an additional intermittent band. When the intermittent band is unavailable, any traffic carried on that band must be shifted to the proprietary bands. Customers are sensitive to both the price they pay and the average congestion they experience across the bands of spectrum from which they receive service. We compare two different access policies for this intermittent band: one in which it is open to all SPs and one in which it is licensed to a single SP. We also allow the band to be divided into multiple subbands where each subband is either open or licensed. We characterize trade-offs between social welfare and consumer welfare that depend on the choice of different access policies and assignments of subbands to SPs. These can involve subtle issues related to the ability of a larger SP to make more efficient use of intermittent spectrum and the increase in competition by assigning more spectrum to smaller SPs. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, operations management.

This paper studies the effects of the diversification of energy portfolios on the merit order effect in an oligopolistic energy market. The merit order effect describes the negative impact of renewable energy, typically supplied at the low marginal cost, to the electricity market. We show when thermal generators have a diverse energy portfolio, meaning that they also control some or all of the renewable supplies, they offset the price declines due to the merit order effect because they strategically reduce their conventional energy supplies when renewable supply is high. In particular, when all renewable supply generates profits for only thermal power generators this offset is complete — meaning that the merit order effect is totally neutralized. As a consequence, diversified energy portfolios may be welfare reducing. These results are robust to the presence of forward contracts and incomplete information (with or without correlated types). We further use our full model with incomplete information to study the volatility of energy prices in the presence of intermittent and uncertain renewable supplies.