Product differentiation, either by style or by quality, is a business strategy with which consumers clearly perceive the company's own products differently from the products of the competitors. In this way companies gain more market power than in the case in which all products are homogeneous (as in the previous sections).

While perfect competition includes only homogeneous products and in the case of a monopoly there is only one differentiated product, an oligopoly may include both homogeneous and differentiated products.

Here you can download the programs for Cournot and Bertrand duopolies with product differentiation.

Product Differentation Material

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Category: Competition data
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  • Minimum requirements for installation:
    • Operating system: Windows XP, Vista, 7 or higher.
    • Computer with Intel Core 2 processor or higher which is used as a server.
    • Local area network including the server and all computers that will be used by the participants of the experiment.

 

  • Note:
    • All treatments in this website have been extensively tested using zTree version 3.6.7. However, it is possible to update them by simply opening them and saving with a more recent version of the program.

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Category: Competition data
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With the introduction of new degrees in economics, finance and accounting, as well as business administration and marketing at the Universitat Jaume I in 2011, the APREX working group for education innovations in microeconomics was formed to carry out a project regarding the inclusion of laboratory classes in the university's official curriculum for microeconomics. This project is an enhancement of a gradual process of introducing experimental classes in this type of lecture, which started in 2007. 

The idea behind the project is to make the students experiment taking production or pricing decisions under different market structures but always with the same underlying demand and cost conditions. Then, the theoretical predictions for the particular situation played are calculated in the problem solving class and compared with the decisions that they took in the lab class. This allows both to help them distinguish between theory and empirics and explore the predictive accuracy of several basic microeconomics models.

For facilitating this classroom activity and promoting it among microeconomics lecturers, we have created this website where you can register and freely download (under a Creative Commons license) instructions, programs, solutions of the underlying theoretical models and examples of graphical analyses of the students' data for each experiment we use.

We are convinced that the use of new technologies and interactive environments provides students with an additional motivation to take on an active part in microeconomics lectures. We hope that you find our materials useful.

 

Best regards,

Iván Barreda Tarrazona

APREX Director

Subcategories

Perfect competition

Descripción competencia perfecta