Cartels may be exempted from competition law if they sufficiently promote sustainability objectives. To qualify, the collusive agreement should not fully eliminate competition. We study how remaining and fringe competition affect incentives to produce more sustainably under semi-collusion in an...

Benchmark rates, such as Libor and Euribor, have been proven vulnerable to manipulation. We analyze benchmark rate collusion, which is challenging due to varying and opposing trading interests of the subset of market participants that determine the rates. Our theory is based on two mechanisms....

Government agencies have a certain freedom to choose among different possible courses of action. This paper studies agency decision-making on priorities in a principal-agent framework with multi-tasking. Agency leadership has discretion over part of the agency's budget to incentivize staff in...

We show how price leadership bans, imposed as part of the European Commission's State aid control on all main mortgage providers except the largest bank, shifted the Dutch mortgage market from a competitive to a collusive price leadership equilibrium. In May 2009, mortgage rates in the...

We revisit classic cartel stability theory to show how comparative statics on sustainability change when firms require a margin before colluding. Such a margin can compensate, for instance, for the cost of colluding, antitrust liabilities or the risk of cartel breakdown. We show that the cartel...

Several competition authorities consider the exemption of horizontal agreements among firms from antitrust liability if the agreements sufficiently promote public interest objectives such as sustainable consumption and production. We show that when consumers value sustainable products and firms...

Market competition can erode socially responsible behavior, suggesting that allowing collusive agreements regarding corporate social responsibility (CSR) may promote public interest objectives such as fair trade and environmental standards. We study this idea in a vertical product...

To stimulate companies to take corporate social responsibility collectively, for example for climate change or fair trade, their agreements may be exempted from cartel law. To qualify under Article 101(3) TFEU, the public benefits must compensate consumers for higher prices of the private good....

Monetary policy affects the cost of capital, and thereby conditions for collusion in loan markets - which in turn influence the transmission of policy rates. Stronger countercyclical interest rate policy responses increase the scope for bank cartels on loan markets by decreasing the critical...

Industry-wide voluntary agreements are touted as a means for corporations to take more corporate social responsibility (CSR). We study what type of joint CSR agreement induces competitors to increase CSR efforts in a model of oligopolistic competition with differentiated products. Consumers have...