Price and Nonprice Rivalry in Oligopoly The Integrated Battleground

Oligopolistic industries are communities of firms which are intensely aware of the high visibility of their price and product quality decisions and their impacts upon rivals' profits. This book adopts a novel approach to oligopolies that permits the combination of competition and cooperation, varying the weights given each in accordance with the structure and ethos of individual industries. It develops the theory of rivalrous consonance as a supplement to or substitute for game theory which seeks to develop a "general theory," incorporating a simultaneous determination of price and quality variables for each firm within the context of multifirm interdependence. It presents methodologies and illustrates them to attain operational frameworks for the application of the theory of integrated competition to real world industries.