In this paper I set forth an antitrust remedy for the oligopolistic pricing problem. Oligopoly pricing resembles a repeated prisoners' dilemma game. Each firm has an incentive to moderately lower its price and thus increase its sales at its competitors' expense. However, each firm knows that its...

Oligopoly has been among the first topics in the experimental economics. Over half a century, some 150 papers have been published. Each individual paper was interested in demonstrating one effect. But in order to do so, experimenters had to specify many more parameters. That way they have...

Both in the US and in Europe, antitrust authorities prohibit merger not only if the merged entity, in and of itself, is no longer sufficiently controlled by competition. The authorities also intervene if, post merger, the market structure has changed such that "tacit collusion" becomes...

A cartel is socially not desirable. But is it a normative problem? And has merger control reason to be concerned about tacit collusion? Neither is evident once one has seen that the members of a cartel face a problem of strategic interaction. It is routinely analysed in terms of game theory....

The seminal paper by Salant, Switzer and Reynolds (1983) showed that merger in a standard Cournot framework with linear demand and linear costs is not profitable unless a large majority of the firms are involved in the merger. However, many strategic aspects matter for firm competition such as...

The unprecedented access of firms to consumer level data facilitates more precisely targeted individual pricing. We study the incentives of a data broker to sell data about a segment of the market to three competing firms. The segment only includes a share of the consumers in the market around...

The present paper is concerned with providing a core model to address the issue of firms simultaneously competing in both prices and quantities (capacity levels) within a simple duopoly market setting where products are asymmetrically differentiated by endogenous quality location. A three-stage...

Using estimable concepts, this paper provides sufficient conditions for third-degree price discrimination to increase or decrease aggregate output, social welfare, and consumer surplus in differentiated oligopoly when all discriminatory markets are open even in the absence of price...

We study the evolution of imitation behaviour in a differentiated market where firms are located equidistantly on a (Salop) circle. Firms choose price and quantity simultaneously, leaving open the possibility for non-market-clearing outcomes. The strategy of the most successful firm is imitated....

Built on the location model, this paper studies the rivalry of two firms in an industry through two-part tariffs. It is found that kinky profit functions are responsible for the coincidence of imperfectly competitive equilibrium and cartelization outcome. A duopoly likely results in higher entry...