Model de Hotelling

Abstract

[en] Harold Hotelling (1895-1973) was an American statistician and an important theoretician of the economy. He earned a PhD in Mathematics from Princeton in 1924 and began as an associate professor at Stanford University until he moved to Columbia University in 1931. It was not until 1946 that he served as professor of Mathematical Statistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His greatest contribution was in the field of monopoly competition. Harold Hotelling developed in his article Stability of Competition in 1929, what is known today as the Hotelling model or linear city model, which contributed greatly to the field of the differentiation of the product. In this Hotelling model he introduced notions of the equilibrium of location in a duopoly. The Hotelling model was a source of inspiration for a large amount of literature that is not only limited to the theory of industrial organization but also in other sciences, such as politics, since some of its conclusions can be applied directly to these matters. This paper is based on Hotelling article Stability of Competition with the main objective of analyzing the model and its subsequent revisions. The model is studied in a one-dimensional space (as defined by H.Hotelling). Finally, in the second part of the paper, the model is developed for a two-dimensional space.