A SPATIAL COMPETITION APPROACH TO CENTRAL PLACE THEORY: SOME BASIC PRINCIPLES*
用空间竞争模型研究中心地理论，分析n家企业在线性市场上销售m种替代或互补商品时的区位均衡，发现当所有商品被消费时，单一企业供应的商品在中心销售，且互补商品企业会聚集在同一地点。
ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the potential offered by the model of spatial competition for the study of central place theory. We consider n firms selling m substitutable or complementary goods to a continuum of consumers evenly distributed along a linear segment. Consumers have the same income and the same utility function which is quadratic in the goods supplied by the firms and linear in the numeraire. The main results are as follows. (1) In any location equilibrium in which all goods are consumed everywhere, each good supplied by a single firm is sold at the market center. In Christaller's terminology, this means that when the exhaustive principle holds in equilibrium, highest‐order goods are made available at the center. (2) When all goods (excluding the numéraire) are complements to each other and each good is sold by a single firm, there always exists an equilibrium in which all the firms locate coincidentally. (3) If the stores selling a given good are under the control of a single owner then, in any equilibrium for which the exhaustive principle holds, the stores are located in a way such that the total transport cost (borne by consumers) is minimized.