This article provides a framework for the analysis of cartel formation. It models the strategic interaction among firms who invest into production capacity, sell a near-homogeneous good, and are subject to unexpected demand shocks with persistence. The firms either compete or collude in prices....

Loyalty discounts and rebates are pricing schemes that offer incentives to buyers for reaching or exceeding certain sales thresholds. In the case of market share discounts, thresholds are expressed as a percentage of the buyer's total purchase requirements. Although market share discounts may...

This paper formalizes an empirically implementable framework for the definition of local antitrust markets in retail markets. This framework rests on a demand model that captures the trade-off between distance and pecuniary cost across alternative shopping destinations within local markets. The...

A common approach to merger simulations used in antitrust cases is to calibrate demand from market shares and a few additional parameters. When the products involved in the merger case are differentiated along several dimensions, the resulting diversion ratios may be very different from those...

This chapter examines anti-cartel enforcement in selected jurisdictions around the world, paying particular attention to the role of private court actions in attaining optimally deterring sanctions. The principal conclusions are as follows. There are numerous indicators that enforcement in North...

An experiment is designed to test the equilibria typically studied in the repeated game literature (i.e. those based on Nash reversion and optimal symmetric two-phase punishment strategies). One hundred pairs of subjects repeatedly set prices in a differentiated demand duopoly setting. Unlike...

A raft of articles offered contrasting views on analytic tools for assessing unilateral effects from differentiated products mergers. We revisit this debate to clarify the issues and place them in context. We consider the choice among analytic tools at three stages of a merger assessment -...

Theories on the welfare and competitive effects of exclusive territories are numerous, yet they provide ambiguous results. This paper exploits a natural experiment in the U.S. brewing industry to identify the direction of change in welfare caused by the use of exclusive territories. On January...

In this paper we provide game theoretic support for the results of the kinked demand curve. By analyzing an infinitely repeated game where unit costs fluctuate stochastically between a low and a high state over time and where firms follow a price-matching punishment strategy, we demonstrate that...

Credit card rebates, which are paid to all credit card users regardless of borrowing, have grown substantially. This paper analyzes the optimal interchange fees in credit cards relative to the interchange fees in debit cards. Compared to debit cards, credit cards raise efficiency by allowing...