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I study the economic implications of the world oil market dominated by OPEC and non-OPEC major oil producing countries using a general equilibrium model of trilateral trade with oil duopoly. There are three countries and three goods, x, y, and oil (z). Home (H) is endowed with good x . Foreign (F) is endowed with good y and also produces oil (z). Middle (M) is an oil producing country and supplies oil only. I consider two types of oil market structure; (1) Cournot duopoly and (2) perfect competition. I find that Foreign is actually worse off under Cournot duopoly despite being a duopolist for wide range of parameter values that reflect real world situations. This is mainly due to reduced consumption of oil and reduced value of good y endowment under duopoly when Foreign is a net oil exporter or oil autarky, and is also due to worsening terms-of-trade effect under duopoly when Foreign is a net oil importer. Welfare reversal with higher welfare of Foreign under oil duopoly occurs only under highly unrealistic parameter values, and hence the main results of the study remain robust.

Fractional calculus provides powerful tool to build more realistic and accurate mathematical models in economic field. This paper aims to explore a proposed fractional-order differentiated Cournot duopoly game and its discretized game.

Conditions for existence and uniqueness of the proposed game’s solution are derived. The existence of Nash equilibrium point and its local and global stability are obtained. Furthermore, local stability analysis of the discretized game is investigated. The effects of fractional-order on game’s dynamics are examined, along with other parameters of the game, via the 2D bifurcation diagrams in planes of system’s parameters are acquired.

Theoretical and numerical simulation results demonstrate rich variety of interesting dynamical behaviors such as period-doubling and Neimark–Sacker bifurcations, attractors’ crises in addition to chaotic attractors. The results demonstrated that the stability Nash equilibrium point of the game can be lost by period doubling or Neimark–Sacker bifurcations.

Oligopoly games are pivotal in the mathematical modeling of some substantial economic areas such as industrial organization, airline, banking, telecommunication companies, international trade and also macroeconomic analysis of business cycles, innovation and growth.

Although the Cournot game and its variants have attracted great interest among mathematicians and economists since the time of its proposition till present, memory effects in continuous-time and discrete-time Cournot duopoly game have not been addressed yet. To the best of author’s knowledge, this can be considered as the first attempt to investigate this problem of fractional-order differentiated Cournot duopoly game. In addition, studying more realistic models of Cournot oligopoly games plays a pivotal role in the mathematical investigation and better understanding of some substantial economic areas such as industrial organization, airline, banking, telecommunication companies, international trade and also in macroeconomic analysis of business cycles, innovation and growth.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the labor market outcome when there are two unions in the industry, representing heterogeneous workers – substitutes or complements in production – and using wage strategies, in the presence of minimum wage regulation.

Three strategic environments are considered: symmetric Bertrand‐Nash duopoly, Stackelberg duopoly, and efficient cooperation between the two unions.

Usually, minimum wage legislation (floor) would decrease employment; it is shown that in Stackelberg environment, minimum wage legislation may induce an increase in total employment. Wage‐pushing strategies by a leader may also arise; and if workers are substitutes, entry deterrence strategies by the leader may be observed.

This paper analyses the impact of minimum wages in duopoly scenarios in an extensive way.

Uses a conjectural variation approach to derive a general result concerning the equivalence of tariffs and quotas. Shows that, as long as the quota is binding, the equivalence of tariffs and quotas depends exclusively on the domestic firm′s conjectural variations. Specifically, the domestic prices of the goods under the quota are higher than, identical to, or lower than those under the tariff if the domestic firm′s conjectural variation under the quota is larger than, equal to, or smaller than that under the tariff. This conclusion holds for both price‐setting and quantity‐setting duopoly with heterogeneous goods as well as quantity‐setting duopoly with homogeneous goods.

Current industrial scenario is largely dependent on cloud computing paradigms. On-demand services provided by cloud data centre are paid as per use. Hence, it is very important to make use of the allocated resources to the maximum. The resource utilization is highly dependent on the allocation of resources to the incoming request. The allocation of requests is done with respect to the physical machines present in the datacenter. While allocating the tasks to these physical machines, it needs to be allocated in such a way that no physical machine is underutilized or over loaded. To make sure of this, optimal load balancing is very important.

The paper proposes an algorithm which makes use of the fitness functions and duopoly game theory to allocate the tasks to the physical machines which can handle the resource requirement of the incoming tasks. The major focus of the proposed work is to optimize the load balancing in a datacenter. When optimization happens, none of the physical machine is neither overloaded nor under-utilized, hence resulting in efficient utilization of the resources.

The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with different existing load balancing algorithms such as round-robin load (RR) ant colony optimization (ACO), artificial bee colony (ABC) with respect to the selected parameters response time, virtual machine migrations, host shut down and energy consumption. All the four parameters gave a positive result when the algorithm is simulated.

The contribution of this paper is towards the domain of cloud load balancing. The paper is proposing a novel approach to optimize the cloud load balancing process. The results obtained show that response time, virtual machine migrations, host shut down and energy consumption are reduced in comparison to few of the existing algorithms selected for the study. The proposed algorithm based on the duopoly function and fitness function brings in an optimized performance compared to the four algorithms analysed.

This study aims to describe the general picture of the competition in multichannel expert services in duopoly market and discuss how the quality difference may affects the competition between service providers with different quality levels, where both providers offer face-to-face channel and one of providers offers online channel additionally and service quality that consumers have heterogeneous preferences for is vertically differentiated. These results can be used to determine which service providers should offer online expert services and understand the competition in multichannel expert services in duopoly.

This paper uses the stylized vertical differentiation model to investigate the role of quality in expert services market, assuming that two services providers offer the same services with different quality levels and one of them having additional online services. Taking into account the differences of services from products and the particularity of online service, this paper extends the vertical differentiation model to expert services market.

The quality difference is the key factor in the competition of expert services. Service prices and the profits of providers, independent of the quality levels, are positively related to the quality difference, whereas the demand of online services is in the opposite direction regardless of which provider offers online channel. It demonstrates that provider with low-quality level should open online channel from the point of view of social welfare if it is closely related to the expert services, even though any provider can make more profits by opening online channel.

This extended vertical differentiation model, taking into account the importance of vertical differentiation in expert service, ignores the horizontal differentiation. More accurate strategies for multichannel expert services providers with what level of the quality a provider should offer is needed in future work. Moreover, this paper does not consider the different waiting costs of consumers in face-to-face channel and assumes that their problem will be solved eventually.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, no study has focused on the quality difference in multichannel expert services market or discussed how to offer online expert services in the duopoly market. This study extends the vertical differentiation model to the multichannel expert service market. Therefore, it fills this research gap and extends research to expert services market in the new network environment, aiming to help understand the competition in multichannel expert services.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to the role of the Fannie Mae/ Freddie Mac duopoly in the American housing market.

First, the paper defines the “government sponsored enterprise,” which is the type of hybrid public/private entity that Fannie and Freddie are and provides an introduction to the other significant government sponsored enterprises. It then explains what Fannie and Freddie do in the American mortgage market and provides a brief history of how the two companies developed. Finally, it evaluates the two companies as duopolists in the conforming mortgage market.

The paper concludes by suggesting that the current financial crisis presents an opportunity to rethink whether the Fannie/Freddie duopoly continues to serve the public interest.

Because of its length, the paper does not review alternative approaches to the status quo that the US Government can take to ensure that it has a stable federal housing finance policy.

The paper argues that the current financial crisis provides an opportunity to revisit the design of the structure of the US housing finance market.

The paper sets forth the rationale and legal basis for characterizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as duopolists.

This paper aims to study the pricing problems on the two-sided market for cases of monopoly and duopoly competition, specifically investigating the impact of platform service quality on the market. Theoretical analysis and computational studies are conducted to investigate the impact of different parameters on the system outcomes.

Mathematical formulations are proposed for cases of monopoly and duopoly competition. For monopolistic market, the optimal pricing and service quality strategies are obtained using mathematical programming method. For duopolistic market, the equilibrium outcomes are derived by game theory. Sensitivity analysis and numerical studies are also adopted to investigate the impact of different parameters.

For monopolistic market, the platform will provide a low service quality when the service cost parameter is large. However, when the cost parameter is small, the platform provides a higher service quality and higher registration prices. Furthermore, the sum of the optimal prices is proportional to the service quality and inversely proportional to the user price sensitivity. For duopolistic market, the competitive equilibrium prices exist under a certain condition. The determinants of equilibrium prices are the gap between the service qualities of two platforms and the cross-group externalities.

For monopolistic market, this paper specifies the role of platform service quality in determining the platform’s pricing strategy. For duopolistic market, this paper presents a market sharing mechanism between two platforms and explores the equilibrium pricing strategies for platforms with different service quality level.

Aims to analyse the labour market outcome when there are two unions in the industry, representing heterogeneous workers – imperfect substitutes in production.

Competition between union policies are viewed in terms of both employment and wage strategies. Results for substitutes and complements are inspected. Attention is given to the strategic behaviour of the unions, towards one another and/or the employer side. Cooperation is modelled using the Nash‐maximand approach.

Gathers some notes and enlargements to the standard collective bargaining problem in which unions maximise utility. Extends the framework to model union competition behaviour for jobs and/or employment that reproduces the standard market product analysis of imperfect competition. Focuses on heterogeneous labour.

The analysis concentrates on the case of union duopoly, but can easily be enlarged to the n‐union setting – which is left for further investigation.

A simple analytical example with Stone‐Geary union utility functions and a linear labour demand system is forwarded.

Switching cost is an important concept in the study of consumer loyalty which has implications for organizational business strategy and regulatory policies. Much research has already examined the formation and influence of switching costs on the consumers' repeated purchase intentions, but little research has focused on quantitative measurement of the switching cost itself. This paper aims to address this issue.

By game theory, a complete Nash‐Bertrand model is proposed to accurately estimate consumer switching costs considering price compensation and transport costs in a duopoly. The relationship between switching costs and market structure is then analyzed by using the example of Hong Kong's wireless telecommunication market. From the observed data of China's wireless telecommunication industry, the model calculates switching costs per year of China Mobile and China Unicom's users respectively, as well as other variables.

The results demonstrate that reducing consumer switching costs will benefit small operators and increase competition in a winner‐take‐all market.

The model is valuable in calculating unseen switching costs and studying the impact of switching costs on market structure, especially for a duopoly in telecommunication.