PRICING PATTERNS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR COMPETITION POLICY

In this paper we discuss different pricing patterns observed from actual data in oligopolistic markets and we are reviewing the most suitable econometric tools to analyze and disentangle patterns informative to competition policy.We argue that there are certain market situations where parallel pricing bears information that can be informative to antitrust authorities. We resort to co-integration analysis to prove that it is possible to identify patterns that can be interpreted as hallmark for collusive behavior.