We provide a theory of how RPM facilitate upstream cartels absent any information asymmetries using a model with manufacturer and retailer competition. Because retailers have an effective outside option to each manufacturer's contract, the manufacturers can only ensure contract acceptance by...

Hub-and-spoke cartels have recently come under the spotlight of competition authorities. The Turkish Competition Authority (TCA) found five grocery retailers and a cooking oil supplier in breach of Article 4 of the Turkish competition act (the equivalent of Article 101 TFEU). In this article, we...

The article presents a unique regression analysis of social-science estimates of the size of cartel overcharges. More than 800 overcharge rates were collected from a variety of published sources that have appeared in the literature during the last 125 years. A meta-analysis of overcharges from...

We study the events alleged in recent Norwegian salmon industry antitrust cases to explore the relationship between vertical integration and collusion. In particular, we are interested in whether vertical integration can facilitate the strategic use of coordination devices such as public price...

This paper studies how information control affects incentives for collusion and optimal organizational structures in principal-supervisor-agent relationships. I consider a model in which the principal designs the supervisor's signal on the productive agent's private information and the...

In this paper we investigate the optimal organization of staggered price increases in cartels. Staggered price increases impose a cost during cartel formation as the price leader initially loses sales. We show that for intermediate discount factors, staggered price increases can only be...

This paper studies how information control affects incentives for collusion and optimal organizational structures in principal-supervisor-agent relationships. I consider a model in which the principal designs the supervisor's signal on the productive agent's private information and the...

Motivated by recent antitrust cases, a hub-and-spoke collusive mechanism involving multiple downstream firms and their common upstream supplier is explored. To this end, I develop a repeated sequential game in which downstream firms receive private demand signals and send private messages to the...

We analyze a principal-supervisor-two-agent hierarchy with soft information. The supervisor may be inefficient such that a noisy signal on the agents’ effort levels is observed. On one hand, the agents require risk premiums to work due to the noisy signal. On the other hand, the supervisor and...

The paper shows that collusion between the CEO of a firm and outside expert generates a conflict between ex-ante provision of effort and ex-post disclosures of bad news if the alliance tends to hide early warning signals that call for restructuring of firm's assets. This tension is resolved by a...