This paper shows that a cartel that observes neither costs, prices, nor sales may still enforce a collusive agreement by tying each firm's continuation profit to the truncated current profits of the other firms. The mechanism applies to both price and quantity competition, and the main features...

Although naive intuition may indicate the opposite, the existing literature suggests that uncertainty about costs in the homogeneous-good Bertrand model intensifies competition: it lowers price and raises total surplus (but also makes profits go up). Those results, however, are derived under two...