La concorrenza come viaggio esplorativo nell'ignoto: dai giochi di prezzo alle azioni sperimentali

Competitive interactions are commonly regarded as equilibrium quantities and prices, with prices close to costs. This analysis fails explaining how different markets and modern competitive strategies emerge, inconsistently with managerial and historical perspectives. It is argued first that the poorness of results and the compression of prices to costs are due to artificial constraints put upon choice sets and to the failure to fully exploiting the underlying game interactions. Under appropriate analytical conditions prices can be shown to likely exceed costs in pure contestable, perfect and monopolistic competition markets. In the second part rivalry as exploratory sequences in the sense of Hayek is deepened. Companies’ strategies are experimental actions that create information and affect companies’ choice sets, game rules and the environment itself. The success of innovative bets depends on how other actors change. Intrinsically good or optimal actions cannot be defined. Sunkness is a pervasive conceptual category.

Sergio Bruno, La concorrenza come viaggio esplorativo nell'ignoto: dai giochi di prezzo alle azioni sperimentali in "STUDI ECONOMICI " 82/2004, pp , DOI: