Advertising in a Differential Oligopoly Game

We illustrate a differential oligopoly game where firms compete a la Cournot in homogeneous goods in the market phase and invest in advertising activities aimed at increasing the consumers reservation price. Such investments produce external effects, characterizing the advertising activity as a public good. We derive the open-loop and closed-loop Nash equilibria, and show that the properties of the equilibria depend on the curvature of the market demand function. The comparative assessment of these equilibria shows that the firms advertising efforts are larger in the open-loop equilibrium than in the closed-loop equilibrium. We also show that a cartel involving all the firms, setting both output levels and advertising efforts, may produce a steady state where the social welfare level is higher than the social welfare levels associated with both open-loop and closed-loop noncooperative settings.