In the EU, the 2017/18 sugar marketing year (MY) was the first with no production quota and most of the price support gone. The Uruguay round restrictions on sugar exports were also not binding anymore, making the EU a net exporter. In MY2018/19 the EU turned back into a net importer as domestic...

Under collusion, firms deviate from current profit maximization in anticipation of future rewards. As current profit maximization places little restrictions on firms' pricing behaviour, collusive conduct is hard to infer. We show that bids from certain firms in the Colombian wholesale...

We analyze the effects of downstream firms' acquisition of pure cash flow rights in an efficient upstream supplier when all firms compete in prices. With an acquisition, downstream firms internalize the effects of their actions on their rivals' sales. Double marginalization is enhanced. Whereas...

This article is devoted to the problem of the detection of overt or tacit collusion equilibrium in the context of the choice of the appropriate econometric method, a choice that is determined by the amount of information that the observer possesses. The author addresses this problem in two...

The purpose of this article is to analyze how the presence of a competitive fringe, composed by price taker firms, can affect the sustainability of collusive equilibria. Our starting point is that there exists a diffused misunderstanding about its strategical role as collusive minus factor. We...

Retailers may enjoy stable cartel rents in their output market through the formation of a buyer group in their input market. A buyer group allows retailers to credibly commit to increased input prices, which serve to reduce combined final output to the monopoly level; increased input costs are...

In a framework where mergers are mutually excluding, I show that firms pursue anti- rather than (alternative) pro-competitive mergers. Potential outsiders to anti-competitive mergers refrain from pursuing pro-competitive mergers if the positive externalities from anti-competitive mergers are...