This article studies dynamic pricing strategies in the Italian gasoline market before and after the market leader unilaterally announced its commitment to adopt a sticky-pricing policy. Using daily Italian firm level prices and weekly average EU prices, we show that the effect of the new policy...

Previous empirical assessments of the effectiveness of structural merger remedies have focused mainly on the subsequent viability of the divested assets. Here, we take a different approach by examining how competitive are the market structures which result from the divestments. We employ a...

The purpose of this paper is to identify empirically the implicit structural model, especially the roles of size asymmetries and concentration, used by the European Commission to identify mergers with coordinated effects (i.e. collective dominance). Apart from its obvious policy-relevance, the...

We analyze the pattern of pool prices in the Spanish electricity market during 1998 by means of a Time Varying Transition Probabilities Markov switching model. Our purpose is two­fold: firstly, to identify and date the drops in prices that cannot be accounted for by supply nor demand...

This paper shows that generators exercised increasing market power in the England and Wales wholesale electricity market in the second half of the 1990s despite declining market concentration. It examines whether this was consistent with static, non-cooperative oligopoly models, which are widely...

This paper shows that as long as the stock market has perfect foresight, some dividends are distributed, and incentives are paid more than once or are deferred, stock-related compensation packages are strong incentives for managers to support tacit collusive agreements in repeated oligopolies....

It has been argued that having a contract market before the spot market enhances competition (Allaz and Vila, 1993). Taking into account the repeated nature of electricity markets, we check the robustness of the argument that the access to contract markets reduces the market power of generators....

Danish ready-mixed concrete is produced in regional oligopolies. Firms rely on price discrimination through secret discounts. The antitrust authority interprets this as lack of competition and has decided to activate its chief weapon against dormant competition: To make the market more...

We study the effects of price signaling activity and underlying propensities to cooperate on tacit collusion in posted offer markets. The primary experiment consists of an extensively repeated baseline sequence and a 'forecast' sequence that adds to the baseline a forecasting game that allows...

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...