This report explains the principal economic and legal features of a unique set of data on 283 modern private international cartels discovered anywhere in the world from January 1990 to the end of 2005. Measured in real 2005 money, aggregate cartel sales and overcharges totaled about $1.2...

We analyze a hub-and-spoke cartel in the Brazilian automotive fuel industry. Using the court documents and detailed data on the supply chain we uncover three mechanisms beyond information sharing used by wholesalers (hub) to help retailers (spokes) solve the obstacles of price coordination:...

We analyze strategic leaks due to spying out a rival’s bid in a first-price auction. Such leaks induce sequential bidding, complicated by the fact that the spy may be a counterspy who serves the interests of the spied at bidder and reports strategically distorted information. This ambiguity...

We consider an international cartel whose members interact repeatedly in their own as well as in third-country segmented markets. Cartel discipline-an inverse measure of the degree of competition between firms-is endogenously determined by the cartel’s incentive compatibility constraint (ICC),...

We study a repeated Cournot competition model where prices are determined not only by firms' quantities but also unobservable market shocks (Green and Porter, 1984). Unlike Green and Porter (1984), market shocks are persistent and today's market condition affects tomorrow's market condition....

I present a model of two quantity-setting firms, each producing two goods in a different country, but enjoying a competitive advantage in only one of them. An international cartel can either shut down trade and manufacture both goods domestically or foreclose the inefficient plant and import the...

Numerous recently uncovered cartels operated along the supply chain, with firms at one end facilitating collusion at the other - hub-and-spoke arrangements. These cartels are hard to rationalize because they induce double marginalization and higher costs. We examine Canada's alleged bread cartel...

A bidding ring is a collection of bidders who collude in an auction in order to gain greater surplus by depressing competition. This entry describes some typical bidding rings and provides an introduction to the related theoretical and empirical literature.

This article studies the strategic interactions between cartelists and the antitrust agency in two theoretical game settings. In the simultaneous game, the numerical results show that it becomes harder for the firms to sustain collusion, but easier for the antitrust agency to detect collusion as...