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...

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...

We study antitrust enforcement that channels price-fixing incentives through setting fines and allocating resources to detection activities. Antitrust fines obey four legal principles: punishments should fit the crime, proportionality, bankruptcy considerations, and minimum fines. Bankruptcy...

In Katsoulacos et al. (2015) we examined the welfare properties of a number of monetary penalty regimes for tackling cartels, including revenue-based penalties, the most widely used regime. We showed that for a typical industry overcharge-based penalties welfare-dominate the others. However...

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...

We analyze how leniency affects cartel pricing in an infinitely-repeated oligopoly model where the fine rates are linked to illegal gains and detection probabilities depend on the degree of collusion. A novel aspect of this study is that we focus on the worst possible outcome. We investigate the...

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 firms to increase CSR efforts in a model of oligopolistic competition with differentiated products. Consumers have a...