Collusion sustainability depends on firms' ability to impose sufficiently severe punishments in the event of deviation from the collusive rule. We extend results from the literature on optimal collusion by investigating the role of a limited liability constraint. We examine all situations in...

When a principal’s monitoring information is private (non-verifiable), the agent should be concerned that the principal could misrepresent the information to reduce the agent’s wage or collect a monetary penalty. Restoring credibility may lead to an extreme waste of resources - the so-called...

This paper shows that the possibility of collusion between an agent and a supervisor imposes no restrictions on the set of implementable social choice functions (SCF) and associated payoff vectors. Any SCF and any payoff profile that are implementable if the supervisor's information was public...

When the information used by a principal to monitor an agent is private, and thus non-verifiable by a third party, the principal has a credibility issue with the agent. The agent should be concerned that the principal could misrepresent the information in order to collect a monetary penalty from...

This paper studies a mechanism-design problem involving a principal-supervisor-agent in which collusion between supervisor and agent can only occur after they have decided to participate in the mechanism. We show how collusion can be eliminated at no cost via the use of a mechanism in which the...

This paper considers a principal-agent model with adverse selection, in which collusion among the agents is possible. We compare the optimal outcome in two cases: (i) the principal can perfectly discriminate the transfers to the agents, and (ii) the principal's power to discriminate the...

Asymmetries in cross-price elasticities have been demonstrated by several empirical studies. In this paper we study from a theoretical stance how introducing asymmetry in the substitution effects influences the sustainability of collusion. We characterize the equilibrium of a linear Cournot...

We discuss the social welfare improvement under centralized and decentralized hierarchies and focus on supervisoris ability to monitor quality. Although the possibility of collusion against the principal is eliminated under decentralized hierarchy, the decentralization is dominating only if...

This paper analyzes optimal contracts in a linear hidden-action model with normally distributed returns possessing two moments that are governed jointly by two agents, who can observe each others' effort levels and draft enforceable side-contracts on chosen effort levels and realized returns....

The paper considers an infinitely repeated competition between vertical manufacturer-retailer hierarchies. In every period, retailers privately observe the demand, consequently manufacturers pay retailers “information rents”. I compare between several collusive equilibria that differ in the...