Do we have effective competition between the gasoline's big five oligopolists (Aral, Shell, Esso, Total and Jet) and fringe gasoline stations? Using 2014 Market Transparency price data from 66 cities with populations between 60,000 and 100,000, we analyze which brands lead price increases, the...

We investigate the effects of passive backward acquisitions in their efficient upstream supplier on downstream firms' ability to collude in a dynamic game of price competition with homogeneous goods. We find that passive backward acquisitions impede downstream collusion. The main driver of our...

We examine whether agency contracts, more than traditional wholesale contracts, facilitate collusion among upstream manufacturers. We develop an infinitely repeated game with a monopoly platform and multiple manufacturers, and show that the agency contract does not facilitate upstream collusion....

Standard models of collusion require that all firms are forward-looking and strategic. When one firm displays naive behavior—i.e., when it is myopic, memoryless, or non-strategic—typical collusive strategies cannot be supported in equilibrium. Motivated by the increasing adoption of...

We study empirically the price effects of upstream cartels that sell through downstream retailers to final consumers. We focus on a German coffee producer cartel that colluded under two different regimes: (i) involving wholesale prices in 2003 and (ii) with additional resale price maintenance...

Motivated by a recent competition policy debate on retailers' collusion in online marketplaces, this paper studies a simple model to shed light on the competitive and welfare effects of this conduct. I find that, when retailers sell their products through a monopolistic e-commerce platform,...

We examine the effects of passive forward ownership on the sustainability of upstream collusion. We consider a homogeneous Cournot duopoly with competing vertical chains. In one chain, the upstream firm has non-controlling partial ownership over its downstream exclusive client. We find that...

Promoting competition to enhance productivity at the firm level and resulting income and growth improvement and a lower cost of living is an important economic and social challenge in Israel. Consistent evidence shows multiple deficiencies leading to a dual functioning of the economy between...

We provide a novel theory of harm for resale price maintenance (RPM). In a model with two manufacturers and two retailers, we show that RPM facilitates manufacturer collusion when retailers have alternatives to selling a manufacturer's product. Because of the alternatives, manufacturers can only...

In a market with two exclusive manufacturer-retailer pairs, we show that colluding manufacturers may not be able to attain supra-competitive profits when contracts with retailers are secret. The stability of manufacturer collusion depends on the retailers' beliefs. We consider various dynamic...