In repeated games, equilibrium often requires that any deviation be punished in the continuation, regardless of whether it is beneficial to the other players. It seems against the nature of non-cooperative game theory for the other players to decide what to do based on what one player did,...

The concept of barriers to accident sequences is an important one in reasoning about the ways in which risks in a system can be reduced to acceptable levels. An attempt was made to characterize the phenomena that, in practice, undermine such barriers. This involved an analysis of 50 accident...

We introduce a perfect price discriminating mechanism for allocation problems with private information. A perfect price discriminating mechanism treats a seller, for example, as a perfect price discriminating monopolist who faces a price schedule that does not depend on her report. In any...

How to establish the existence of subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE) in bargaining models if no stationary SPEs (SSPEs) exist? The backward-induction technique of Shaked and Sutton (1984, Econometrica) applies to the cyclical structure of SPE payoffs and provides recursive dynamics on the bounds...

We study antitrust enforcement that channels price-fixing incentives through setting fines and allocating resources to detection activities. Antitrust fines obey four legal principles: punishments should fit the crime, proportionality, bankruptcy considerations, and minimum fines. Bankruptcy...

We analyze maximal cartel prices in infinitely-repeated oligopoly models under leniency where fines are linked to illegal gains, as often outlined in existing antitrust regulation, and detection probabilities depend on the degree of collusion. We introduce cartel culture that describes how...