This paper analyzes dynamic cartel formation and antitrust enforcement when firms operate in demand-related markets. We show that cartel prosecution can have a knock-on effect: desisting a cartel in one market reduces profits and cartel stability and leads to the break-up of the cartel in the...

Many cartels are formed by individual managers of different firms, but not by firms as collectives. However, most of the literature in industrial economics neglects individuals' incentives to form cartels. Although oligopoly experiments reveal important insights on individuals acting as firms,...

We investigate the effect of a vertical merger on downstream firms' ability to collude in a repeated game framework. We show that a vertical merger has two main effects. On the one hand, it increases the total collusive profits, increasing the stakes of collusion. On the other hand, it creates...

While price-fixing cartel prosecutions have received significant attention, the policy determinants and the political preferences that guide such antitrust prosecutions remain understudied. We empirically examine the intertemporal shifts in U.S. antitrust cartel prosecutions during the period...

We study an infinitely repeated oligopoly game in which firms compete on quantity and one of them is capacity constrained. We show that collusion sustainability is non-monotonic in the size of the capacity constrained firm, which has little incentive to deviate from a cartel. We also present...

We provide an explanation for a frequently observed vertical restraint in ecommerce, namely that brand manufacturers partially or completely prohibit that retailers distribute their high-quality products over the internet. Our analysis is based on the assumption that a consumer's purchasing...

This paper sheds light on an empirical controversy about the effect of competition on price discrimination. We introduce individual demand uncertainty into Hotellingś model of product differentiation and show that firms offer advance purchase discounts. Consumers choose between an early...

We investigate the effect of a ban on third-degree price discrimination on the sustainability of collusion. We build a model with two firms that may be able to discriminate between two consumer groups. Two cases are analyzed: (i) Best-response symmetries so that profits in the static Nash...

We analyze the effects of better algorithmic demand forecasting on collusive profits. We show that the comparative statics crucially depend on the whether actions are observable. Thus, the optimal antitrust policy needs to take into account the institutional settings of the industry in question....

We analyze spying out a rival's price in a Bertrand market game with incomplete information. Spying transforms a simultaneous into a robust sequential moves game. We provide conditions for profitable espionage. The spied at firm may attempt to immunize against spying by delaying its pricing...