We study the welfare effects of non-binding advance price announcements. Applying a differentiated Bertrand model with horizontal products and asymmetric information, we find that such announcements can help firms to gain information on each other thereby allowing them to achieve higher profits....

Due to being much better documented, legal cartels have recently attracted the interest of many researchers who aim to understand the functioning of illegal cartels in detail. This paper contributes to the question of what we can learn from legal cartels by taking a closer look at the cement...

A number of South African price-fixing cases have been brought in markets previously characterized by legal cartels or monopolies. Furthermore, many South African markets have been liberalized since 1994, reflected in structural change in many market relationships and rendering many of the...

In recent years, South African competition authorities have initiated a number of price-fixing cases in markets where cooperation among competitors was legal and often encouraged. These markets present economists with special difficulties when estimating cartel overcharges. Conventional...

The paper aims at assessing the costs and benefits of antitrust enforcement. The analysis starts with an investigation of why competition is typically worth protecting followed by a collection of empirical evidence which shows that competition actually needs protection by antitrust policy in...