Quantity conjectural variations in oligopoly games under different demand and cost functions and multilevel leadership

This paper considers a noncooperative game of quantity competition among firms in an oligopoly market under general demand and cost functions. Each firm's optimal response to the strategies of other firms is assessed by the magnitude and sign of its conjectural variation, expressing the firm's expectation regarding the counterparty's supply quantity change in response to the firm's unit change in its supply quantity. A game of n firms with the sum of conjectural variations (SCV) regarding all counterparties as the generalized response characteristic is studied. The existence of a bifurcation of the players' response is revealed; a bifurcation is a strategy profile of the game in which both positive and negative responses are possible with an infinite-magnitude SCV value. Methods are developed for calculating the SCV value under different types of inverse demand functions (linear and power) and cost functions (linear, power, and quadratic), and the impact of these characteristics of firms on the bifurcation state is comparatively analyzed.