Leniency clauses, offering cartelists legal immunity if they blow the whistle on each other, is a recent anti-trust innovation. The authorities wish to thwart cartels and promote competition. This effect is not evident, however; whistle-blowing may enforce trust and collusion by providing a tool...

Dispersion in retail prices of identical goods is inconsistent with the standard model of price competition among identical firms, which predicts that all prices will be driven down to cost. One common explanation for such dispersion is the use of a loss-leader strategy, in which a firm prices...

Behavioural and industrial economists have argued that, because of cognitive limitations, consumers are liable to make sub-optimal choices in complex decision problems. Firms can exploit these limitations by introducing spurious complexity into tariff structures, weakening price competition....

We study a two-stage duopoly game, where, at the first stage, firms choose if adopting or not a social responsibility label. The firm who adopts the social responsibility label (the ethical firm) has high marginal costs, while the firm who doesn’t adopt it (the standard firm), supports low...

We experimentally examine the effects of flexible and fixed prices in markets for experience goods in which demand is driven by trust. With flexible prices, we observe low prices and high quality in competitive (oligopolistic) markets, and high prices coupled with low quality in non-competitive...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of anenergy tax on technical improvements and on prices ofconsumer durables induced by strategic competition inenergy efficiency. If the gasoline tax is raised thisdoes in principle not affect the producers of carsbecause the motorist pays for it...

We set up a duopoly model with dynamic capacity constraints under demand uncertainty. We endogenize the investment decisions of the firms, examine their intertemporal pricing behavior, their incentives to merge, as well as the welfare implications of a merger. Whereas under known and constant...

We study the relation between the number of firms and price-cost margins under price competition with uncertainty about competitors' costs. We present results of an experiment in which two, three and four identical firms repeatedly interact in this environment. In line with the theoretical...

We explore the characteristics of a capacity-then-price game for a duopoly market with product differentiation and stochastic demand. The analysis shows that a minimum threshold value for the level of vertical product differentiation exists, relative to horizontal product differentiation, for...