This paper analyzes the inner workings of cartels. To understand how sanctioning institutions prevent cartel formation we study their effect on firms' communication in a laboratory experiment. Using machine learning to organize the chat communication into topics, we find that firms are less...

Robert Bork's Antitrust Paradox (1978) has been justification for lack of antitrust behavior for over four decades. His test essentially asks if consumers are harmed by the pricing practices of the firm in the market in which they purchase the good or service. Even if these firms are monopoly or...

The internet giants - Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, among others - have transformed society with both positive and negative effects. The negative effects have been stark. There have been huge disruptions caused by e-commerce. More recently, subtler, but even more serious negative effects...

This paper analyzes volatility spillovers in multivariate GARCH-type models. We show that the cross-effects between the conditional variances determine the persistence of the transmitted volatility innovations. In particular, the influence of a foreign volatility innovation on a conditional...

We investigate the effects of alternative open access regimes on market performance. In particular, by means of an economic laboratory experiment we compare the market outcomes under unregulated wholesale competition, under a price-fixing rule (where firms must maintain their wholesale price for...

We provide experimental evidence for the hypothesis that bounded rationality is an important element of the theory of the firm. We implement a simplified version of a mechanism designed to perfectly solve the holdup problem under conditions of perfect rationality (Maskin 2002). We test whether...

Successful coordination is key for economic and societal wealth. The rich literature on the minimum-effort game (MEG) has provided valuable insights into coordination, both theoretically and empirically. Yet, although real-world scenarios often involve asymmetric benefits and/or costs from...

Many situations in the social and economic life are characterized by rivalry and conflict between two or more competing groups. Warfare, socio-political conflicts, political elections, lobbying, and R&D competitions are all examples of inter-group conflicts in which groups spend scarce and...

We study the role of information about the multiplier in a finitely repeated investment game. A high multiplier increases the reputational incentives of a trustee, leading to more repayments. Our perfect Bayesian equilibrium analysis shows that if the trustee is privately informed about the...

Indirect reciprocity is defined as a specific kind of behavior: An agent rewards or penalizes another agent for having behaved kindly or unkindly toward a third party. This paper analyzes the question of what drives indirect reciprocity: Does the agent reward or penalize because she...