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Home Bias in Multimarket Cournot Games

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  • Catherine Roux
  • Luís Santos-Pinto
  • Christian Thöni

Abstract

We explore the role played by trade costs for the home bias in trade. In a series of Cournot duopoly experiments with a home and an export market, we compare output choices when firms face different levels of export costs. We find that there is two-way trade in identical products and that firms hold the majority market share in their home market. The resulting home bias turns out to be, however, stronger than that predicted by theory, and it even occurs without trade costs. We have strong evidence that collusion contributes to the home bias observed in our experiment.

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  • Catherine Roux & Luís Santos-Pinto & Christian Thöni, 2015. "Home Bias in Multimarket Cournot Games," Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie 15.04, Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie.
    • Handle: RePEc:lau:crdeep:15.04
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Intra-Industry Trade; Spatial Oligopoly; Home Bias; Collusion; Experiment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F12 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Models of Trade with Imperfect Competition and Scale Economies; Fragmentation
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior

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