CONJECTURAL VARIATIONS AND LOCATION THEORY
用猜想变分方法分析不完全竞争市场中企业的区位选择，说明竞争对手的反应如何影响企业集聚意愿，对研究空间经济与产品设计的学者有参考价值。
ABSTRACT. Imperfectly competitive markets, such as those involving spatial separation of producers and consumers are characterized by interactions between competing firms. Actions call forth reactions and the possible reactions form an important part of the information set that should be used to determine the initial actions. One method for dealing with this is the ‘conjectoral variation’ approach. Despite some shortcomings this methodology sheds considerable light on decision‐making in the space economy. Equally importantly, it sheds light on more general microeconomies modelled as spatial analogs. This paper shows that conjectural variations and the nature of competition between rival firms do indeed ‘matter’ in location choice and more generally in product design. In particular, we shall be concerned with showing how the conjectured responses of rival firms affect their desire to agglomerate.