Diferenciació de producte via competència espacial: el model de Hotelling

Abstract

[en] The Hotelling model was created in 1929 by Harold Hotelling, its purpose was to set which was the optimal product differentiation that two firms should achieve, using a parametrization of this product differentiation through a physical and linear distance between the two firms. The present project follows an article published by d’Aspremont, Jaskold Gabszezwicz and Thisse in 1979, in which they analyze in detail the model, identify a contradictory output in the seminar Hotelling paper that results from a false premise and suggest a quadratic parametrization escaping from the previous difficulty. The main goal of this project is to build an application which can give numeric solution for the revised Hotelling model and which allows to expand itself to new parametrizations getting over the analitic difficulty that can arise from them. To do so, it is necessary to understand and explain the needed considerations to build a two-stage game model like this one and to find a subgame perfect equilibrium, considering price and localization.