Competition in a New Industrial Economy: Toward an Agent-Based Economic Model of Modularity

When firms (conglomerates) are competing, not only for the present, with a given population of customers and a fixed set of commodities or service, but also for the future, in which products are constantly evolving, what will be their competitive strategies and what will be the emerging ecology of the market? In this paper, we use the agent-based modeling of a modular economy to study the markup rate dynamics in a duopolistic setting. We find that there are multiple equilibria in the market, characterized by either a fixed point or a limit cycle. In the former case, both firms compete with the same markup rate, which is a situation similar to the familiar classic Bertrand model, except that the rate is not necessarily zero. In the latter case, both firms survive by maintaining different markup rates and different market shares.