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...

Since the late 90s,, European industries of electricity and gas have been subject to a process of concentration at both horizontal and vertical levels. At first glance, this consolidation is quite natural since, on the one hand, the application of European directives to open to competition has...

In this paper, we tackle the dilemma of pruning versus proliferation in a vertically differentiated oligopoly under the assumption that some firms collude and control both the range of variants for sale and their corresponding prices, likewise a multiproduct firm. We analyse whether pruning...

We study the stochastic effect of resource exploration in dynamic Cournot models of exhaustible resources, such as oil. We first treat the case of a monopolist who may undertake costly exploration to replenish his diminishing reserves. We then consider a stochastic game between such an...

Governments often make public announcements that call into question oligopolistic behavior. Yet little is known about how firms respond to them. We study gasoline retailers' price responses to antitrust announcements shaming them for price gouging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Price effects are...

This paper analyses whether prices and trade-flows in the international market for metallurgical coals were subject to non-competitive conduct in the period 2008 to 2010. To do so, I develop mathematical programming models – a Stackelberg model, two varieties of a Cournot model, and a perfect...

This article proposes a two-stage oligopoly model for the crude oil market. In a game of several Stackelberg leaders, market power increases endogenously as the spare capacity of the competitive fringe goes down. This effect is due to the specific cost function characteristics of extractive...