Strategic investment under uncertainty in a triopoly market: Timing and capacity choice

Abstract

This paper analyzes investment decisions under uncertainty in a triopoly market. We determine the investment timing and the investment size of the firms under the condition that firms hold an asymmetric cost structure. We build on Shibata (European Journal of Operational Research, 2016) who solves this problem with exogenous investment size. He finds that the firm with the lowest cost does not always enter the market as the first investor. However, we obtain that, when extending the analysis for capacity choice, the firm with the lowest cost always enters first in the triopoly market. The designed algorithm, which employs the bisection method at several steps to solve this model, is of value of its own as it can be more generally applied to investment problems in markets with several firms and multiple investment opportunities.