Choosing Roles in a Model of Quality Differentiation

Abstract

This paper examines games involving quality differentiation in a sequential duopoly model and points to the leadership solutions. It also deals with the issue of choosing roles (leader or follower) of the firms in quality and price choice game. In this paper, we show that (i) the leadership solutions are the subgame perfect equilibria and simultaneous price competition is in either case of Stackelberg leadership solutions not, and that (ii) the sustaining leadership solution is a unique subgame perfect equilibrium if the diversity of tastes is sufficiently large.