How do incentives to collude depend on how asymmetric firms are? In many markets product quality is an important parameter that determines firms' market strategies. We study collusion in a quality-differentiated duopoly and we adopt a Nash bargaining approach to compute the collusive equilibrium...

This article is devoted to the problem of the detection of overt or tacit collusion equilibrium in the context of the choice of the appropriate econometric method, a choice that is determined by the amount of information that the observer possesses. The author addresses this problem in two...

The purpose of this article is to analyze how the presence of a competitive fringe, composed by price taker firms, can affect the sustainability of collusive equilibria. Our starting point is that there exists a diffused misunderstanding about its strategical role as collusive minus factor. We...

Retailers may enjoy stable cartel rents in their output market through the formation of a buyer group in their input market. A buyer group allows retailers to credibly commit to increased input prices, which serve to reduce combined final output to the monopoly level; increased input costs are...

In a framework where mergers are mutually excluding, I show that firms pursue anti- rather than (alternative) pro-competitive mergers. Potential outsiders to anti-competitive mergers refrain from pursuing pro-competitive mergers if the positive externalities from anti-competitive mergers are...