Understanding how business cartels form and expand is foundational for developing sound deterrence strategies. Past work (i.e. Connor, 2005) has relied on net present value (NPV) methods to evaluate the streams of costs and benefits of forming or joining a cartel. While NPV adequately measure...

Cartel operations still exist worldwide despite the recent development and enforcement of antitrust laws in scores of countries that previously had no such legal framework. Since 1990, 283 international cartels were discovered by antitrust authorities around the world (Connor 2003). According to...

The objective of the research in this study is to evaluate the pricing and market conduct of milk manufacturers and retailers. Using data from a U.S. Midwestern state, we estimate a random coefficient logit demand model (RCL) to empirically investigate a range of possible scenarios in the milk...

The article offers measures of own and cross cost pass-through in a structural framework. Unlike the traditional reduced-form analysis used in the previous literature, our approach is applicable in situations where firm marginal cost data are unobserved. The empirical value of the model is...

The endogeneity of retail market power arises in the retail pricing equation due to the correlation between margins and unobserved cost components. Nevertheless, it has long been ignored in the equilibrium analysis of retail behavior. We address the issue via a control function approach in a new...

We devise a formal test of market power that is applied to the international durum market. The model captures the asymmetric cost structure brought about the initial payment system of the Canadian Wheat Board. The model generates testable hypotheses about market conduct and optimal strategic...

Replaced with revised version of paper 08/24/09.

This article develops a methodology for empirically analyzing vertically strategic interactions in a multi-level supply channel. The model is used to analyze the vertical channel for U.S. butter manufacturing and retailing. Aggregating products to the firm level and using a nonlinear AIDS demand...

The purpose of the research in this paper is to investigate the impact of differentiated vertical strategies by agricultural biotechnology firms in the U.S. cottonseed market. The model advances the measurement of industry concentration to consider substitution/complementarity relationships...

This research shows that increased concentration in the U.S. wheat milling industry has not led to noncompetive pricing in upstream or downstream markets. Increased concentration has helped to reduce the marketing margin by $0.65 for every 100 pounds of flour produced. This is about 7% of the...