Before 1970s, IO predominantly follows the paradigm of “structure-conduct-performance”, or often called the Harvard tradition, after Professor Joe Bain. The basic idea is that market structure determines how ...rms behave, which in turn determines the performance of the market. The research methodology is mainly empirical: running regressions on variables of market structures to see their e¤ect...

This thesis is composed by three different studies on oligopolies. The first chapter is on oligopolies with perfect complements; the second chapter studies oligopolies with positive network effects and incompatible networks, and the last one deals with a polluting duopoly subject to environmental regulation. Specifically, the first chapter provides a thorough characterization of the properties ...

This is a chapter of a book manuscript entitled Topics in Microeconomics . Comments, criticism and recommendations are welcome. The chapter starts with an elementary introduction to the three basic oligopoly theories, associated with the names of Cournot, Bertrand and Stackelberg. These theories are then covered in depth, including generalizations, extensions to entry, exit, and capacity choice...

Maintaining a headquarters is the backbone of corporate operations. The enhancement of a headquarters’ performance may significantly contribute to the performance improvement and revenue growth of the entire corporation. It is especially important to develop a performance evaluation model for headquarters in this era of profit squeeze. As the saying goes, “You can’t manage it until you can meas...

Scheduling problems occur in a lot of application fields such as production, timetabling and computer systems. These problems have already been widely studied and modeled (Carlier and Chrétienne, 1988; Pinedo, 1995; Pinedo and Chao, 1999; Vernadat, 1999). Each problem has its own characteristics; it is much more complicated when tackling real industrial problems. Starting from object-oriented t...