Multi-Market Competition and Coordination in Games. Three essays in game theory and industrial organization

This thesis consists of one essay in industrial organization and two essays in noncooperative game theory. The  first essay (Chapter I) concerns credibility in multimarket competition. The analysis focuses on the incumbent's possibilities to exploit first-mover advantages with investments in capacity as it competes with potential entrants in several markets. The other two essays (Chapter II and III) both examine coordination problems. The former studies the effects of uncertainty, while the latter investigates the effects of  communication. The analysis in Chapter II indicates that uncertainty in a coordination game influences the problem of equilibrium selection. It is shown that a  unique equilibrium is robust to perturbations of the players' strategies. Moreover, the noise-proof equilibrium is inefficient. The results in Chapter III suggest that  structured and costly pre-play communication allow players to select among multiple strict Nash equilibria. The expected outcome has a short description in the language constructed by players. Moreover, the equilibrium is likely to be inefficient with respect to Pareto optimality in the underlying game. In the remaining parts of this introduction we shall give a brief outline of the problems analysed and the main results in each paper.