Economía
Competition and product diferentiation in the argentine chocolate bar industry
Resumen
This paper analyzes the behavior of the Argentine chocolate bar industry during the period 2019-2022. It mainly focuses on the level of competition between the firms in the industry, estimating conduct parameters that signal the existence of harder or softer competition. The estimations change considerably under different demand specifications, and also if we explicitly model product differentiation at the level of the supplying firms. This allows discarding extreme hypotheses such as perfect competition and collusion, and it slightly favors the existence of quantity (Cournot) competition over price (Bertrand) competition.