Leniency programs have become widespread and are generally quite active as reflected in the number of applications. What is not well-understood is how they affect the number of cartels. This paper develops and explores a theoretical framework to help understand when leniency programs are likely...

Towards understanding what makes a cartel successful, this chapter examines a variety of collusive practices with an eye to how they vary in their efficacy in establishing and sustaining supracompetitive prices and in the legal risk they create for firms. Four conditions for cartel success are...

Unlawful collusion is when firms have a mutual understanding to coordinate their behavior for the purpose of achieving a supracompetitive outcome. Given the legal focus on mutual beliefs, this paper initiates a research program to explore how much and what type of mutual beliefs among firms...

We hypothesize a particular source of cartel instability and explore its relevance to understanding cartel dynamics. The cartel instability is rooted in the observation that, upon cartel formation, the relative positions of firms are often fixed which may lead some growth-conscious members to be...

To explore the efficacy of a corporate leniency program, a Markov process is constructed which models the stochastic formation and demise of cartels. Cartels are born when given the opportunity and market conditions are right, while cartels die because of internal collapse or they are caught and...