Equilibrium incentives for most-favored customer clauses in an oligopolistic industry
研究非合作寡头市场中企业是否采用同期最惠客户条款的均衡决策，发现不采用可能是占优策略，与追溯性条款的效果不同。
This paper analyzes the economics of contemporaneous most-favored customer clauses (MFCC) in a non-cooperative n -firm oligopoly. In the first stage of a two-stage game, each firm independently decides whether to adopt MFCC; in the second stage, firms set prices non-cooperatively, given the first stage choices. In contrast to work on retroactive MFCC by Cooper [ The RAND Journal of Economics (1986, 17, 377–388)], our analysis shows that not adopting MFCC can be a dominant strategy. The difference between our results and Cooper's highlights important differences between retroactive and contemporaneous MFCC and suggests that MFCC are a less powerful facilitating practice than retroactive MFCC. Our analysis also sheds new light on Grether and Plott's [ Economic Inquiry (1984, 22, 497–507)] experimental results regarding the effects of MFCC on average industry prices.