Most technical standards development organizations (SDOs) have adopted internal policies embodying “due process” criteria such as openness, balance of interests, consensus decision making, and appeals. Unlike other aspects of SDO governance, relatively little scholarly research has...

To make sense of mixed empirical evidence on the pricing rigidity of cartels, this paper studies how colluding firms price their goods in a model where firms have private marginal costs and sell to consumers with search costs. In this model, firms repeatedly interact in selling a homogeneous...

This paper studies problems of capture in certification markets. It derives conditions under which reputation enables certifiers to resist capture. Moreover, it identifies a general principle of reputation models that favors concentration. This explains certifiers as efficient market...

We show that information sharing among banks may serve as a collusive device. An informational sharing agreement is an a-priori commitment to reduce informational asymmetries between banks in future lending. Hence, information sharing tends to increase the intensity of competition in future...

This paper derives conditions under which reputation enables certifiers to resist capture. These conditions alone have strong implications for the industrial organization of certification markets: 1) Honest certification requires high prices that may even exceed the static monopoly price. 2)...