We revisit the pros and cons of cartel criminalization with focus on its possible introduction in the EU. We document a recent phenomenon that we name EU ``leniency inflation", whereby leniency has been increasingly awarded to many, and sometimes all members of a cartel. We argue that, coupled...

This paper reports results from an experiment studying how fines, leniency programs and reward schemes for whistleblowers affect cartel formation and prices. Antitrust without leniency reduces cartel formation, but increases cartel prices: subjects use costly fines as (altruistic) punishments....

The paper analyzes how cooperation in a repeated social game may help to sustain cooperation in a "linked" repeated production game. We show that this may happen a) because of available "social capital," defined as the slack of punishment power present in the social repeated game; b) because,...

We consider two ascending auctions and show that many of the (unwanted) collusive or signaling equilibria studied in the literature in the framework of the SEAMO (simultaneous English auction for multiple objects) don't have a counterpart in the JAMO (Japanese auction for multiple objects). We...

This paper proposes a tractable model that allows us to analyze how agents' perception of relationships with others determines the structures of networks. In our model, agents are endowed with their own multidimensional characteristics and their payoffs depend on the social distance between...

We exhibit a natural environment, social learning among heterogeneous agents, where even slight misperceptions can have a large negative impact on long-run learning outcomes. We consider a population of agents who obtain information about the state of the world both from initial private signals...

We take an equilibrium-based approach to study the interplay between behavior and misperceptions in coordination games with assortative interactions. Our focus is assortativity neglect, where agents fail to take into account the extent of assortativity in society. We show, first, that...

We study to what extent information aggregation in social learning environments is robust to slight misperceptions of others' characteristics (e.g., tastes or risk attitudes). We consider a population of agents who obtain information about the state of the world both from initial private signals...

Social media are at the center of countless debates on polarization, misinformation, and even the state of democracy in various parts of the world. An essential feature of social media is the ranking algorithm that determines how content is presented to the users. This paper studies the dynamic...

We formulate a model of social interactions and misinferences by agents who neglect assortativity in their society, mistakenly believing that they interact with a representative sample of the population. A key component of our approach is the interplay between this bias and agents’ strategic...