Tacit collusion reduces welfare comparably to explicit collusion but remains mostly unaddressed by antitrust enforcement which greatly depends on evidence of explicit communication. We propose to target specific elements of firms' behavior that facilitate tacit collusion by providing...

Cartels may be exempted from competition law if they sufficiently promote sustainability objectives. To qualify, the collusive agreement should not fully eliminate competition. We study how remaining and fringe competition affect incentives to produce more sustainably under semi-collusion in an...

Several competition authorities consider the exemption of horizontal agreements among firms from antitrust liability if the agreements sufficiently promote public interest objectives such as sustainable consumption and production. We show that when consumers value sustainable products and firms...

This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of...

Empirical evidence that horizontal shareholding has created anticompetitive effects in airline and banking markets have produced calls for antitrust enforcement. In response, others have critiqued the airline and banking studies and argued that antitrust law cannot tackle any anticompetitive...

We show how temporary ownership by private equity firms affects industry structure, competition and welfare. Temporary ownership leads to strong investment incentives because equilibrium resale prices are determined by buyers incentives to block rivals from obtaining assets. These incentives...

This comment was filed with the Department of Justice Antitrust Division on December 31, 2009, as "Comments Regarding Agriculture and Antitrust Enforcement Issues in Our 21st Century Economy" in response to the DOJ/USDA request for public comments for the agencies' joint workshops on antitrust...

At first glance, Holmes's general prominence in American jurisprudence does not appear to carry over into antitrust law. His antitrust opinions often appear to a modern reader perverse. Early in his tenure on the Supreme Court, he opined in his famous dissent in Northern Securities Co. v. United...

A bundled discount occurs when a seller charges less for a bundle of goods than for its components when sold separately. A characteristic of such discounting is that a rival who makes only one of the products in the bundle may have to give a larger per item discount in order to compensate the...

We describe a simple initial indicator of whether a proposed merger between rivals in a differentiated product industry is likely to raise prices through unilateral effects. Our diagnostic calibrates upward pricing pressure (UPP) resulting from the merger, based on the price/cost margins of the...