L1 - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market PerformanceReturn

Innovation is an important topic in economics. This paper highlights duopoly innovation under the Hotelling model with game theory approaches. This paper argues that market power, as measured by the cost advantage of a dominant firm over its rival, serves to enhance the incentive to innovate in a Hotelling model of spatial competition. This result implies that a firm with cost advantage will have a larger incentive than its rivals to further its cost advantage as new opportunities for innovation arise thereby implying that innovation increases concentration. This result is in contrast to the result obtained by Holmes et al. (2012) who use the Betrand model to show that "market power" lowers the incentive to innovate. We think that the inelastic demand causes this economic phenomenon.

This paper highlights the monopoly firms' commitments for goods requiring high maintenance expenditure, such as elevators, televisions and computers. A guarantee time limit model to maintain these special goods is presented in this paper. Based on this model, several types of commitments with different guarantee time limits are compared under monopoly conditions. This paper finds that the guarantee pattern has no effect on the monopoly firm's profits if all information is known to both the consumer and the monopolist. It is also shown that if a monopoly firm exaggerates its product quality claims in its advertisements, then it cannot meet its warranty guarantees. Industrial organizational theory is employed to analyze maintenance guarantees in this work.

This study is focused on relationship between external and internal impact on decisionmaking influencing international business strategies in transitional economy. Drawing from secondary and primary interview data on international business activities of 18 startups and 20 enterprises operating in the Czech Republic (including firms controlled by both domestic and foreign investors), respectively, the authors propose five strategies. In general, the findings suggest that strategies developed by domestically owned niche-focused or recent startups and those carefully guided by inbound foreign direct investors are more successful. Moreover, the more successful ( i.e., those experiencing significant domestic and international sales growth) are those who develop unique marketing strategies. Uncontrollable externalities do not appear to have an impact on firms' success or failure. The regionally oriented exporting tends to be the dominant strategy. Globally oriented export activities are relatively modest whereas outbound direct investment strategies are very minor compared with inbound foreign direct investment activities.