Basing-point pricing is known to have been abused by geographically dispersed firms in order to eliminate competition on transportation costs. This paper develops a topographic test for collusive basing-point pricing. The method uses transaction data (prices, quantities) and customer project...

A novel debate within competition policy and regulation circles is whether autonomous machine learning algorithms may learn to collude on prices. We show that when fims face short-run price commitments, independent Q-learning (a simple but well-established self-learning algorithm) learns to...

We examine recent claims that a particular Q-learning algorithm used by competitors 'autonomously' and systematically learns to collude, resulting in supracompetitive prices and extra profits for the firms sustained by collusive equilibria. A detailed analysis of the inner workings of this...

This paper develops a model of the birth and death of cartels in the presence of enforcement activities by a Competition Authority (CA). We distinguish three sets of interventions: (a) detecting, prosecuting and penalizing cartels; (b) actions that aim to stop cartel activity in the short-term,...

For a general class of oligopoly models with price competition, we analyze the impact of ex-ante leniency programs in antitrust regulation on the endogenous maximal-sustainable cartel price. This impact depends upon industry characteristics including its cartel culture. Our analysis disentangles...

Three well-known solutions for cooperative TU-games are the Shapley value, the Banzhaf value and the equal division solution. In the literature various axiomatizations of these solutions can be found. Axiomatizations of the Shapley value often use efficiency which is not satisfied by the Banzhaf...

We analyze maximal cartel prices in infinitely-repeated oligopoly models under leniency where fines are linked to illegal gains, as often outlined in existing antitrust regulation, and detection probabilities depend on the degree of collusion. We introduce cartel culture that describes how...

Even under antitrust enforcement, firms may still form a cartel in an infinitely-repeated oligopoly model when the discount factor is sufficiently close to one. We present a linear oligopoly model where the profit-maximizing cartel price converges to the competitive equilibrium price as the...

The condition is derived for Friedman 's trigger strategy to sustaina collusive market equilibrium as a noncooperative Nash equilibriumgiven subjective beliefs as to the antitrust authority's ability of suc-cesfully dissolving the illegal cartel.