Single facility location on a network under mill and delivered pricing

^** E-mail: pelegrin{at}um.es Firms normally use either a mill price or a delivered pricepolicy, depending on market conditions (type of good, transportationway, customers location, costs, etc). In this paper, the problemof selecting the best location for an entering firm in competitionwith some pre-existing firms, under each price policy, is studiedon a network for the first time. With mill pricing, an equilibriumin price rarely exists and it is assumed that all competingfirms set a common mill price for all customers. With deliveredpricing, there exists a Nash equilibrium in price and it isassumed that the equilibrium price in each area is offered tothe customers in that area. In both cases, we consider thatcustomers buy from the cheapest facility and the same rulesare used for tie breaking in the lowest cost. While the profitmaximization problem for the entering firm always has optimalsolutions under mill pricing, this problem might not have anoptimal solution under delivered pricing. We show some discretizationresults and give procedures to find the full set of optimal,or -optimal, solutions to the problem under the two price policies.A comparison of results with the two price policies is givenby using an illustrative example.