Although the pricing dynamics of hardcore cartels have been studied intensively from a theoretical perspective, empirical evidence is still rare. We combine publicly available data with a unique private data set of about 340,000 market transactions from 36 smaller and larger customers of German...

Cartel detection is usually viewed as a key task of either competition authorities or compliance officials in firms with an elevated risk of cartelization. We argue that customers of hard core cartels can have both incentives and possibilities to detect such agreements on their own initiative...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. Sellers quote prices strategically, inducing a knapsack game. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. We...