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Stackelberg Independence*
Author(s) -
Hinnosaar Toomas
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
the journal of industrial economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.93
H-Index - 77
eISSN - 1467-6451
pISSN - 0022-1821
DOI - 10.1111/joie.12244
Subject(s) - stackelberg competition , independence (probability theory) , economics , microeconomics , externality , demand curve , marginal cost , function (biology) , constant (computer programming) , mathematical economics , marginal utility , mathematics , computer science , evolutionary biology , programming language , biology , statistics
The standard model of sequential capacity choices is the Stackelberg quantity leadership model with linear demand. I show that under the standard assumptions, leaders’ actions are informative about market conditions and independent of leaders’ beliefs about the arrivals of followers. However, this Stackelberg independence property relies on all standard assumptions’ being satisfied. It fails to hold whenever the demand function is non‐linear, marginal cost is not constant, goods are differentiated, firms are non‐identical, or there are any externalities. I show that small deviations from the linear demand assumption may make the leaders’ choices completely uninformative.