The paper provides a comprehensive survey of the economics behind the fight against hard core cartels. Differentiating between four subsequent stages – characterisation, welfare effects, enforcement and evaluation – the paper pays particular attention to cartel detection methods, the...

The paper develops a four-step framework to detect anticompetitive horizontal mergers. In the first step, an estimate of the impact of the merger on the market price needs to be derived. Subsequent, the second step of the framework has to assess whether such a predicted price increase would be...

We hypothesize a particular source of cartel instability and explore its relevance to understanding cartel dynamics. The cartel instability is rooted in the observation that, upon cartel formation, the relative positions of firms are often fixed which may lead some growthconscious members to be...

We study competition in markets with significant transport costs and capacity constraints. We compare the cases of price competition and coordination in a theoretical model and find that when firms compete, they more often serve more distant customers that are closer to plants of competitors. By...