This paper studies repeated games with private monitoring where players make optimal decisions with respect to costly monitoring activities, just as they do with respect to stage-game actions. We consider the case where each player can observe other players' current-period actions accurately...

The paper considers tacit collusion in markets which are not fully transparent on both sides. Consumers only detect prices with some probability before deciding which fi?rm to purchase from, and each fi?rm only detects the other fi?rm's price with some probability. Increasing transparency on the...

Theoretical work has suggested that contact between firms in different markets can facilitate tacit collusion. Empirical work on this link has been limited. We address the paucity of empirical evidence with a novel plant-level dataset for the cement industry during the Great Depression. We find...

This paper investigates the effects on tacit collusion of increased market transparency on the consumer side as well as on the producer side of a market. Increasing market transparency on the consumer side, increases the benefits to a firm from undercutting the collusive price. It also decreases...

This paper considers the effect of monopoly-promoting export cartels on domestic production. It is argued that export cartels facilitate tacit collusion by monitoring defections more efficiently. This slackesn the incentive constraint of tacit collusion. Optimizing firms competing both in the...

Both in the US and in Europe, antitrust authorities prohibit merger not only if the merged entity, in and of itself, is no longer sufficiently controlled by competition. The authorities also intervene if, post merger, the market structure has changed such that "tacit collusion" becomes...

The degree of collusiveness of a market with consumer switching costs is studied in an infinite-horizon overlapping-generations model of duopolistic competition. In contrast to previous models of switching costs, this paper assumes that firms compete for the demand for a homogeneous good by...

Danish ready-mixed concrete is produced in regional oligopolies. Firms rely on price discrimination through secret discounts. The antitrust authority interprets this as lack of competition and has decided to activate its chief weapon against dormant competition: To make the market more...

This paper shows that generators exercised increasing market power in the England and Wales wholesale electricity market in the second half of the 1990s despite declining market concentration. It examines whether this was consistent with static, non-cooperative oligopoly models, which are widely...

This paper is about conscious parallelism in a duopoly with differentiated products. Conscious parallelism is modelled by a "policy of fixed relative prices" (frp) i. e. starting from a competitive equilibrium both duopolists vary prices by the same percentage. This price increasing continues...