The paper studies how does the size of a cartel affect the possibility that its members can sustain a collusive agreement. I obtain that collusion is easier to sustain the larger the cartel is. Then, I explore the implications of this result on the incentives of firms to participate in a cartel....

The purpose of this paper is to represent in which way a stable and no negligible growth in demand can affect the level of sustainability of collusion. For the European Commission this assumption is seen as a factor that disincentives collusion and pushes to a competitive behavior. This fact...

Allowing firms to cooperate in their R&D is an industrial policy, which has received much attention in recent economics literature. Many of these contributions are based on the seminal analysis of d'Aspremont and Jacquemin (1988). We provide a general version of their model, which encompasses...

The paper proposes a theory of the anti-competitive effects of debt finance based on the interaction between capital structure, managerial incentives, and firms' ability to sustain collusive agreements. It shows that shareholders' commitments that reduce conflicts with debtholders such as hiring...

This paper introduces a number of game-theoretic tools to model collusive agreements among firms in vertically differentiated markets. I firstly review some classical literature on collusion between two firms producing goods of exogenous different qualities. I then extend the analysis to a...

In this paper, we tackle the dilemma of pruning versus proliferation in a vertically differentiated oligopoly under the assumption that some firms collude and control both the range of variants for sale and their corresponding prices, likewise a multiproduct firm. We analyse whether pruning...

I find that current US's and EU's Antitrust laws -- in particular their "moderate"' leniency programmes that only reduce or at best cancel sanctions for price-fixing firms that self-report -- may make collusion enforceable even in one-shot competitive interactions, like Bertrand oligopolies and...

In this paper we analyse a common agency model in which agents can choose with how many principals they want to work, while principals cannot condition contracts on the agent's decision to accept other contracts. In this case of "non-intrinsic" common agency we characterise the equilibrium....

Many voluntary agreements (VA's) fall under the European or Dutch cartel prohibition (Article 81 EC, Article 6 Mededingingswet). This paper starts with an abstract description of the relation between competition and environmental protection. Particular attention is paid to the role in this...

This article analyzes competition between two asymmetric networks, an incumbent and a new entrant. Networks compete in non-linear tariffs and may charge different prices for on-net and off-net calls. Departing from cost-based access pricing allows the incumbent to foreclose the market in a...