We explore whether lawful cooperation in buyer groups facilitates collusion in the product market. Buyer groups purchase inputs more economically. In a repeated game, abandoning the buyer group altogether or excluding single firms constitute credible threats. Hence, in theory, buyer groups...

This paper offers a new and broad insight into the landscape of German cartels, utilizing a unique dataset of all illegal horizontal cartels detected by the German Federal Cartel Office (FCO) between 1958 and 2004 and all legal cartels authorized during the same time period. We also provide the...

We estimate the impact of renewable energy sources on the merit order and the wholesale price in Spain. We use a structural vectorautoregressive model for the merit order of production and argue that wind and solar production are exogenous to the system. As expected the overall effect is...

This paper investigates pricing in laboratory markets when human players interact with an algorithm. We compare the degree of competition when exclusively humans interact to the case of one firm delegating its decisions to an algorithm, an n-player generalization of tit-for-tat. We further vary...

We explore the difference between explicit and tacit collusion by investigating the impact communication has in experimental markets. For Bertrand oligopolies with various numbers of firms, we compare pricing behavior with and without the possibility to communicate among firms. We find strong...

We conduct experiments testing the relationship between excess capacity and pricing in repeated Bertrand-Edgeworth duopolies and triopolies. We systematically vary the experimental markets between low excess capacity (suggesting monopoly) and no capacity constraints (suggesting perfect...

One key problem regarding the external validity of laboratory experiments is their duration: while economic interactions out in the field are often lengthy processes, typical lab experiments only last for an hour or two. To address this problem for the case of both symmetric and asymmetric...

The hypothesis that vertically integrated firms have an incentive to foreclose the input market because foreclosure raises its downstream rivals' costs is the subject of much controversy in the theoretical industrial organization literature. A powerful argument against this hypothesis is that,...

We assess the predictive power of a model of other-regarding preferences - inequality aversion - using a within-subjects design. We run four different experiments (ultimatum game, dictator game, sequential-move prisoners' dilemma and public-good game) with the same sample of subjects. We elicit...

Cooperation in prisoner's dilemma games can usually be sustained only if the game has an infinite horizon. We analyze to what extent the theoretically crucial distinction of finite vs. infinite-horizon games is reflected in the outcomes of a prisoner's dilemma experiment. We compare three...