Taxation and Welfare in an Oligopoly with Strategic Commitment

This paper establishes comparative statics results for an oligopoly model with strategic commitment. Firms compete in two stages. In the first stage, firms decide on strategic cost-reducing R&D investment, whereas they choose output in the second stage. Taking an excise tax/subsidy as a shift parameter in the second stage game, the short-run as well as long-run effects on output, cost-reducing R&D investment, and second-best welfare will be examined. The crucial role played by the strategic substitutability of outputs as well as cost-reducing R&D investments is clarified, and a variant of the Le Chatelier-Samuelson principle in the authors' game-theoretic model is obtained.