Cristián Troncoso-Valverde

Firms face a fundamental challenge when allocating scarce human capital between proprietary technological efficiency and social innovation. Social initiatives such as ethical sourcing and circular supply chains help build brand identity and differentiate products, but the transparency they require inevitably leaks operational know-how to competitors. We formalise the strategic relationship between these two investments and show that it is not static: at low commitment levels, the spillover dominates and the two paths act as strategic substitutes, while past a critical threshold, the resulting differentiation softens competition and amplifies the returns to technological investments, turning them into strategic complements. The transition is robust to Bertrand pricing, oligopolistic competition, and fully symmetric games. From a welfare standpoint, the market undersupplies social innovation throughout, and two talent-targeted Pigouvian subsidies exactly close the gap, offering a tractable benchmark for policy design in industries where sustainability and efficiency increasingly converge.

Strategic alliances make firms' boundaries permeable to information leakages that may benefit the competitive position of partnering firms. In this paper, we examine the implications of information leakage on the incentives to join a strategic alliance and the nature of competition in the product market. We show that information leakage can trigger opportunistic behaviours in which firms engage in unprofitable alliances simply because the possibility of learning sensitive information about their competitors increases the expected private rents that firms earn when competing in the product market. Thus, our findings uncover a purely informational mechanism through which information leakage affects the incentives to join a strategic alliance that does not rely on the firm's ability to absorb spillovers from other firms. We also show that the incentives to devise alliances to gain access to the partner's sensitive private information may remain even if the negatively affected firm can pursue compensation for the damage that this deceptive business practice may cause.

This paper aims to study the role of absorptive capacities in coopetitive alliances that involve leakages of sensitive private knowledge regarding firms' production processes.

This paper uses a game theoretic approach to model a differentiated product market in which two firms asymmetrically informed about the economic value of a business opportunity must cooperate to exploit this opportunity. Under coopetition, firms gain access to their partners' core knowledge as the result of inevitable leakages of information. Firms differ in their absorptive capacities, which affects their abilities to leverage this new knowledge outside the collaborative activity.

Firms with superior absorptive capacities are more likely to devise alliances whose purpose is to gain access to their partners' core knowledge. This opportunistic behaviour does not disappear even if firms compensate their partners for the damages caused by this deceptive business practice. This paper also finds that a highly specialised product safeguards firms with limited absorptive capacities against these opportunistic behaviours.

This paper provides a theoretical analysis of the role that absorptive capacities and product specialisation play in influencing the emergence of opportunistic behaviours in coopetitive alliances. The theoretical analysis underscores the extent to which the risk of opportunism associated with the exploitation of a partner's specific core knowledge outside the scope of the cooperative activity affects not only the nature and intensity of market competition but also the incentives to pursue coopetitive alliances.

I investigate the incentives to release information in markets in which auctioneers running second-price auctions compete for buyers by releasing information about their products before buyers decide in which auction they wish to participate. I provide sufficient conditions for the existence of an equilibrium in which both sellers release information even if there are only two buyers in the market. This result is in contrast to previous findings reported in the literature showing that the optimal decision for a monopolist facing a fixed set of two buyers is to not release any information. Thus, the results of the paper suggest that competition between auctioneers strengthens the incentives to release information in markets in which selling mechanisms are second-price auctions.

I examine the implications of meet-the-competition clauses (MCCs) for the strategic disclosure of product quality in a duopoly in which sellers can adopt these clauses before setting their prices. I show that MCCs generate incentives for the disclosure of product quality because these clauses facilitate monopoly pricing in states of nature in which the quality of products is the same. This suggests that MCCs may encourage the disclosure of information because sellers can use them to coordinate their pricing decisions based on the information revealed through disclosure.

We provide a partial characterization of the set of outcome functions that can be supported as perfect Bayesian equilibrium in the recommendation game described in T. Yamashita, Mechanism games with multiple principals and three or more agents, Econometrica 78(2) (2010) 791–801. We show that the set of outcome functions that can be supported is at least as large as the set supportable by a mechanism designer in the sense of Myerson (Myerson, 1979). We show how to support random and correlated outcomes as equilibrium outcomes in the recommendation game.

This paper investigates possible changes in Chilean domestic consumer preferences for wine through the estimation of a demand function that allows for structural breaks and regime shifts in the cointegrating relationship. Our findings support both higher own–price elasticity and higher substitutability between wine and beer after 1982, when a shift in regime in the demand function is found. We believe our findings might be due to the introduction of an increasing number of wine varieties in Chile during the last two decades. We argue that more wine varieties affect domestic consumer preferences by altering the product diversity available in the domestic market.