The dynamics of a triopoly Cournot game

This paper reconsiders the Cournot oligopoly (noncooperative) game with iso-elastic demand and constant marginal costs, one of the rare cases where the reaction functions can be derived in closed form. It focuses the case of three competitors, and so also extends the critical line method for non-invertible maps to the study of critical surfaces in 3D. By this method the various bifurcations of the attractors and their basins are studied. As a special case the restriction of the map to an invariant plane when two of the three firms are identical is focused. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.