This paper investigates the behaviour of the mark-up of prices over marginal costs under two different assumptions about market structure. In the customer market model firms lower their mark-up when current output is low relative to future profits, foregoing current profits in order to capture...

Despite the increasingly market-friendly approach to unfair competition law (UCL) adopted by EU law, the protection of competitors from unfair trading practices (B2B) remains a salient feature in certain jurisdictions. Such a feature can be the source of tension with European law on at least two...

Using the coefficient of cooperation, we analyse the effect of cost asymmetries on collusive agreements when firms are able to coordinate on distinct output levels than the unrestricted joint profit maximization outcome. In this context, we first investigate the extent to which collusive...

The focus of the present work is to study the impact of the second-hand market the collusive behavior. I analyze firms' preferences for having an active second-hand market and whether policies (i.e. leasing policy, buy-back policy and warranty policy) that affect the functioning of the...

Unfair trade practices (UTPs) demonstrate anticompetitive behavior which can be characterized into two general types: exclusionary abuse--an act of the firm (or a group of firms) to prevent entry of potential firms; or exploitative abuse--referring to actual abuse of market power. However, this...

Assuming constant marginal cost, it is shown that a switch from specific to ad valorem taxation has no effect on the critical discount factor required to sustain collusion. This result is shown to hold for Cournot oligopoly as well as for Bertrand oligopoly when collusion is sustained with...

This study constructs a model of anticompetitive exclusive-offer competition between two existing upstream firms. Under exclusive-offer competition, the upstream firm's profit depends on the rival’s exclusive offer. If the rival makes an exclusive offer acceptable for the downstream firm, the...