We explore targeted punishment as an explanation for collusion among many firms. In a series of Cournot oligopoly experiments with various numbers of firms, we compare production decisions with and without the possibility to target punishment at specific market participants. We find strong...

We study the role of communication in collusive market sharing. In a series of Cournot oligopoly experiments with multiple markets and repeated interaction, we vary the types of information that firms can exchange. We distinguish between hard information-verifiable information about past...

The paper analyzes the effects of more intense competition on firms' incentives to invest in process innovations. We carry out experiments for two-stage games, where R&D investment choices are followed by product market competition. As predicted by theory, an increase in the number of firms from...

We examine the interplay of endogenous vertical integration and costreducing downstream investment in successive oligopoly. We start from a linear Cournot model to motivate our more general reducedform framework. For this general framework, we establish the following main results: First,...

We analyze a Bayesian merger game under two-sided asymmetric information about firm types. We show that the standard prediction of the lemons market model-if any, only low-type firms are traded-is likely to be misleading: Merger returns, i.e. the difference between pre- and post-merger profits,...