Hotelling was right

Abstract

This paper proves existence of a subgame perfect equilibrium in Hotelling's original (unidimensional city, linear transportation costs, uniform distribution of the consumers, two firms with identical and constant marginal cost, perfectly inelastic demand) location-price game such that in the location subgame the location choices of the firms are pure and identical. The result can be extended to variations of the original setup (multidimensional city, nonlinear transportation costs, nonuniform distribution of consumers, many firms with identical and constant marginal costs, two or more firms with nonidentical but constant marginal costs). © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.