Bifurcation Theory of a Racetrack Economy in a Spatial Economy Model

Abstract

Racetrack economy is a conventional spatial platform for economic agglomeration in spatial economy models. Studies of this economy up to now have been conducted mostly on $2^k$ cities, for which agglomerations proceed via so-called spatial period doubling bifurcation cascade. This paper aims at the elucidation of agglomeration mechanisms of the racetrack economy in a general setting of an arbitrary number of cities. First, an attention was paid to the existence of invariant solutions that retain their spatial distributions when the transport cost parameter is changed. A complete list of possible invariant solutions, which are inherent for replicator dynamics and are dependent on the number of cities, is presented. Next, group-theoretic bifurcation theory is used to describe bifurcation from the uniform state, thereby presenting an insightful information on spatial agglomerations. Among a plethora of theoretically possible invariant solutions, those which actually become stable for spatial economy models are obtained numerically. Asymptotic agglomeration behavior when the number of cities become very large is studied.