Factors facilitating collusion may not successfully predict cartel occurrence: when a factor predicts that collusion (explicit and tacit) becomes easier, firms might be less inclined to set up a cartel simply because tacit coordination already tends to go in hand with supra-competitive profits....

In a Bertrand-oligopoly experiment, firms choose whether or not to engage in cartel-like communication and, if so, they may get fined by a cartel authority. We find that four-firm industries form cartels more often than duopolies because they gain less from a hysteresis effect after cartel...

We explore whether lawful cooperation in buyer groups facilitates collusion in the product market. Buyer groups purchase inputs more economically. In a repeated game, abandoning the buyer group altogether or excluding single firms constitute credible threats. Hence, in theory, buyer groups...

Cooperation in prisoner's dilemma games can usually be sustained only if the game has an infinite horizon. We analyze to what extent the theoretically crucial distinction of finite vs. infinite-horizon games is reflected in the outcomes of a prisoner's dilemma experiment. We compare three...