The Kinked Demand Model and the Stability of Cooperation

This paper revisits a particular behaviour for firms competing in imperfect competitive markets, underlying the well known model of kinked demand curve. We show that under some symmetry and regularity conditions, this asymmetric behaviour of firms sustains monopoly pricing, and possesses therefore some "rationality" interpretation. We also show that such a behaviour can be generalized and interpreted as a norm of behaviour that sustains efficient outcomes in a more general class of symmetric games.