This paper analyzes price collusion in a repeated game with two submarkets; a standard and a premium quality segment. Within this setting, we study four types of price-fixing agreement: (i) a segment-wide cartel in the premium submarket only, (ii) a segment-wide cartel in the standard submarket...

The prohibition against price fixing is competition law’s most important and least controversial provision. Yet there is far less consensus than meets the eye on what constitutes price fixing, and prevalent understandings cannot be reconciled with principles of oligopoly theory. This article...

A novel debate within competition policy and regulation circles is whether autonomous machine learning algorithms may learn to collude on prices. We show that when fims face short-run price commitments, independent Q-learning (a simple but well-established self-learning algorithm) learns to...

This paper analyzes price discrimination of an upstream cartel in the presence of a dominant firm at the retail level. Charging different wholesale prices creates a bond between the upstream cartel and the favored downstream firm. This bond reduces or eliminates this firm's incentives to accept...

Algorithmic competition has arrived. With it has come the specter of algorithmic collusion – rapid detection of co-conspirators’ defection via technologically enhanced price monitoring and setting capability can encourage anticompetitive collusion. Strikingly, the ability to track...