Monopoly behaviour with speculative storage

Abstract

We analyze the effects of competitive storage when the production of the good is controlled by a monopolist. The existence of competitive storers serves to reduce the monopolist's effective demand when speculators are selling and to increase it when they are buying. This results in the monopolist manipulating the frequency of stockouts, and hence the price-smoothing effects of competitive storage. We find that competitive storage affects both the level and the volatility of price under monopoly. The average price level is higher with storage due to the monopolist's desire to induce stockouts by occasionally keeping the price just at the level that induces a stockout. Although storage does reduce the volatility of prices under monopoly production, prices are more volatile than they would be under perfectly competitive production, even though stockouts occur less frequently under monopoly. These results are demonstrated through closed-form solutions of the two-period version of the model and computational solutions to the infinite horizon version of the model.