Efficiency Analysis of Cournot Competition in Service Industries with Congestion
研究了存在拥塞效应时服务提供商之间的古诺竞争，量化了无管制寡头市场相对于社会最优的福利损失，发现无溢出时损失不超过25%，有溢出时效率取决于边际溢出成本与消费者边际收益的相对大小。
We consider Cournot competition in the presence of congestion effects. Our model consists of several service providers with differentiated services, each competing for users who are sensitive to both price and congestion. We distinguish two types of congestion effects, depending on whether spillover costs exist, that is, where one service provider's congestion cost increases with the other providers' output level. We quantify the efficiency of an unregulated oligopoly with respect to the optimal social welfare with tight upper and lower bounds. We show that, when there is no spillover, the welfare loss in an unregulated oligopoly is limited to 25% of the social optimum, even in the presence of highly convex costs. On the other hand, when spillover cost is present, there does not exist a constant lower bound on the efficiency of an unregulated oligopoly, even with affine cost. We show that the efficiency depends on the relative magnitude between the marginal spillover cost and the marginal benefit to consumers. This paper was accepted by Christian Terwiesch, operations management.