Imposing a minimum quality standard (MQS) is conventionally regarded as harmful if firms compete in quantities. This, however, ignores its possible dynamic effects. We show that an MQS can hinder collusion, resulting in dynamic welfare gains that reduce and may outweigh the static losses which...

The paper assesses the impact of the detection of a hard-core cartel in the Swiss market for road surfacing on post-cartel competition. In addition to an investigation of supply-side factors, demand-side factors, and market prices, the paper also derives estimates of the economic effects of the...

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...

The paper studies how does the size of a cartel affect the possibility that its members can sustain a collusive agreement. I obtain that collusion is easier to sustain the larger the cartel is. Then, I explore the implications of this result on the incentives of firms to participate in a cartel....

The purpose of this paper is to represent in which way a stable and no negligible growth in demand can affect the level of sustainability of collusion. For the European Commission this assumption is seen as a factor that disincentives collusion and pushes to a competitive behavior. This fact...

To account for the illegal nature of price-fixing agreements, detection probabilities are introduced in a dynamic oligopoly. It follows that for a trigger strategy to sustain a non-cooperative collusive equilibrium as a SPNE both the discount rate and all per-period detection probabilities have...

The condition is derived for Friedman 's trigger strategy to sustaina collusive market equilibrium as a noncooperative Nash equilibriumgiven subjective beliefs as to the antitrust authority's ability of suc-cesfully dissolving the illegal cartel.

An increase in cartel discovery probability due to irregular price movements that result from cartel defection is shown to increase cartel stability as short-run defection profits are less likely to be earned.

We experimentally examine the effectiveness of antitrust policies against bidding rings in theEnglish auction (EN) and the first-price sealed-bid auction (FP). We consider both traditionalantitrust policy (without a leniency program) and modern antitrust policy (with a leniencyprogram). In EN,...