Access to Commitment Devices Reduces Investment Incentives in Oligopoly

In this paper we analyze incentives to invest in capacity prior to a sequence of Cournot spot markets with varying demand. We compare equilibrium investment in the absence and in presence of the possibility to trade on forward markets. We find that the access to strategic devices (such as forward contracts as analyzed by Allaz and Vila (1993), or, equivalently strategic delegation as analyzed by Fershtman and Judd (1987) or Vickers (1985)) prior to spot market competition reduces equilibrium investments.