Essays on Competition and Conflict

These works contribute to the current understanding of conflict resolution and consumer behavior, as well as to our ability to formally analyze these and other economic models. The first chapter demonstrates that the use of negotiation in place of arbitration to settle disputes may lead to an increase in surplus by reducing the incentives of the involved parties to invest in their ability to engage in conflict. The second chapter derives the demand that faces competing firms when consumers shop strategically and the prices and capacities are fixed and common knowledge. The equilibrium motivates and justifies the implementation of the well-known proportional rationing rule in studying price competition. The final chapter, which is joint with Professor Jason Lepore, develops a verifiable sufficient condition for the existence of a mixed strategy equilibrium in discontinuous games. This condition is then used to demonstrate existence of equilibrium in a large class of games of price competition for which existence of equilibrium had not yet been proven