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Competition for Scarce Resources

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Submitted By vijaysin2000
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RAND Journal of Economics Vol. 41, No. 3, Autumn 2010 pp. 524–548

Competition for scarce resources
P´ ter Es˝ ∗ e o and Lucy White∗∗∗ Volker Nocke∗∗

We model a downstream industry where firms compete to buy capacity in an upstream market which allocates capacity efficiently. Although downstream firms have symmetric production technologies, we show that industry structure is symmetric only if capacity is sufficiently scarce. Otherwise it is asymmetric, with one large, “fat,” capacity-hoarding firm and a fringe of smaller, “lean,” capacity-constrained firms. As demand varies, the industry switches between symmetric and asymmetric phases, generating predictions for firm size and costs across the business cycle. Surprisingly, increasing available capacity can cause a reduction in output and consumer surplus by resulting in such a switch.

1. Introduction
Standard models of industrial organization treat inputs as being in perfectly elastic supply and their trade disconnected from the downstream market. However, in many real-world industries, the firms that compete downstream also face each other in the input market where supply is inelastic. For example, jewelry makers that vie for the same customers also compete for precious stones whose supply is limited; competing airlines divide a fixed number of landing slots at a given airport; software companies that produce rival operating systems draw from the same pool of skilled programmers; retailers of gas (petrol) use a common input that is in scarce supply; and so on. In this article, we investigate the interaction between efficient input markets and competitive downstream industries and find some unexpected results. We study a model where firms with the same decreasing-returns technology compete first for scarce production capacity in an input
University of Oxford; peter.eso@economics.ox.ac.uk. University of Mannheim,

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