Previous authors who have considered the issue of noncooperative entry deterrence have not found the free rider problem to be a significant factor. These authors, however, have only considered models in which the exact investment needed to deter entry is known with certainty. In this paper I add uncertainty to the models investigated by these previous authors, and demonstrate that the free rider problem can be significant, but is not so in all cases. That is, for certain types of entry deterring investments the introduction of uncertainty causes the oligopoly to underinvest in entry deterrence; however, for other types no underinvestment result arises.

Economists have traditionally viewed the allocation of workers among jobs through the concept of comparative advantage. This paper investigates hierarchical production models which display an absence of comparative advantage, in order to demonstrate that for hierarchical production there is a second allocating factor which plays an important role. Two results are found. First, the allocation of workers among jobs tends to match high ability workers with positions which value ability highly. Second, despite the fact that the models display an absence of comparative advantage, i.e. the standard theoretical explanation for why wage distributions might be skewed, the models' wage distributions are skewed to the right relative to the underlying ability distributions.