We study communication in a static Cournot duopoly model under the assumption that the firms have unverifiable private information about their costs. We show that cheap talk between the firms cannot transmit any information. However, if the firms can communicate through a third party,...

This paper studies communication in a static Cournot duopoly model under the assumption that the firms have unverifiable private information about their costs. We investigate the conditions under which the firms cannot transmit any information through cheap talk, and show that when these...

We derive a bound on the seller's revenue loss in optimal auctions from unanticipated bidder collusion. The relative loss is rather small when there are few bidders. It is increasing with the number of bidders but at a slow rate.

We study cheap-talk pre-play communication in the static all-pay auctions. For the case of two bidders, all correlated and communication equilibria are payoff equivalent to the Nash equilibrium if there is no reserve price, or if it is commonly known that one bidder has a strictly higher value....