This paper shows how competing firms can facilitate tacit collusion by making passive investments in rivals. When firms are identical, only multilateral partial cross ownership (PCO) facilitates tacit collusion; the incentives of firms to collude in this case depend in a comlex way on the whole...

We analyse how the internal organisation of firms affects the correspondence between private and social incentives for horizontal merger. Applying a model of endogenous merger formation in a three-firm asymmetric Cournot industry, we contrast the cases of entrepreneurial and managerial firms....

This paper examines the effects of search costs on prices in a Bertrand duopoly. It is shown that if the search cost is lowered, the expected price goes down in a single play of the stage game. However, if the game is repeated it may be easier to sustain collusion the lower the search cost. In...

A two-country model of the FDI versus export decisions of firms is analysed. The analysis considers both the Cournot duopoly and the Bertrand duopoly models with differentiated products. It is shown that the static game is often a prisoners' dilemma where both firms are worse off when they both...

We examine a market in which consumers are forced to rely on noisy price signals to select between homogeneous products. The noise originates either from firms' price obfuscation or consumers' bounded information processing capabilities. Standard models and empirical experiments of markets with...

For a large class of demand and cost functions, we characterize the limit equilibrium set under Bertrand oligopoly when entry is exogenous. Unless average cost is constant, we find that the folk theorem of perfect competition necessarily fails. We also relate our results to those in Novshek and...

We examine if the folk theorem of perfect competition holds under Bertrand competition (when firms supply all demand), both when entry is exogenous, as well as when it is free. Inter alia, we also characterize the limit equilibrium sets.

Menu-cost models that provide a theoretical underpinning for the "Keynesian asymmetry" whereby nominal prices are more flexible upward than downward consider relatively uncompetitive market structures (monopoly, oligopoly, monopolistic competition). We examine the effect of menu costs on a...

Friedman and Thisse (RAND Journal of Economics, 1993) show that spatial agglomeration appears in a standard two-stage location price model if the symmetric firms can collude in prices. We introduce a cost difference between two firms. We show that agglomeration never appears in a collusive...

Cost asymmetry is generally thought to hinder collusion because a more efficient firm has both more to gain from a deviation and less to fear from retaliation than less efficient firms. Our paper reexamines this conventional wisdom and characterizes optimal collusion without any prior...