We examine a market in which consumers are forced to rely on noisy price signals to select between homogeneous products. The noise originates either from firms' price obfuscation or consumers' bounded information processing capabilities. Standard models and empirical experiments of markets with...

Cost asymmetry is generally thought to hinder collusion because a more efficient firm has both more to gain from a deviation and less to fear from retaliation than less efficient firms. Our paper reexamines this conventional wisdom and characterizes optimal collusion without any prior...

It is usually believed that higher competition, implying more active firms, benefits consumers. We show that this may not be the case in an industry with asymmetric cost firms. A rise in the number of more cost inefficient firms makes the consumers worse-off in the presence of a welfare...

The present paper aims to analyze the Tobacco market in Colombia, and determine in it, the effects of public policy regulation, surveillance and control national authorities. Specifically establish what was the economic behavior of the brands and their evolution in terms of efficiency, after the...

The arm's length principle states that the transfer price between two associated enterprises should be the price that would be paid for similar goods in similar circumstances by unrelated parties dealing at arm's length with each other. This paper examines the effect of the arm's length...

Alternative telecom operators have continuously invested in their own infrastructure in recent years. After more than a decade since liberalisation, competitive conditions have substantially changed, especially in urban areas. European regulatory authorities have acknowledged this development by...

The article focuses on the emergence and operation of cartels in sectors in which companies differ in terms of production costs. The author shows that stable cartels can operate in sectors made up of enterprises that are heterogeneous in terms of costs and based on price leadership. However,...

This paper deals with the issue of transparency in the pricing process for motor fuels, vis-à-vis the collusion charges between oil companies (for which no evidence is found) and the «myth» of «one» national price for motor fuels. Such an approach ignores both the competition between oil...

This chapter estimates sustainable coverage and competitive effects of entry for Swiss newspaper sellers which sell composite goods, including a range of other products such as food and near-food items. It utilises the applied entry threshold ratio methodology from Bresnahan and Reiss (1991),...

Fixed telephony has long been a fundamentally important market for European telecommunications operators. The liberalisation and the introduction of regulation in the end of the 1990s, however, allowed new entrants to compete with incumbents at the retail level. A rapid price decline and a...