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...

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...

One of the key roles of government is to coordinate the activities of citizens. One reason why governments are efficient facilitators of coordinated action, in addition to their ability to force compliance or tax, is that they are typically endowed with more information than the individuals they...

In a Bertrand-oligopoly experiment, firms choose whether or not to engage in cartel-like communication and, if so, they may get fined by a cartel authority. We find that the four-firm industries form cartels more often than the duopolies because they gain less from a hysteresis effect after...

This paper considers two games, a stag hunt and a prisoners' dilemma. Each game features non-binding, costless, and free-form pre-play communication. I focus on players who verbally first suggest cooperation in each game. I study experimentally whether the frequency of verbal initiative-taking...

This paper studies the role of public information in multiple-agent coordination problems underlying a variety of economic scenarios such as banking and debt crises. The impact of information on coordination in such settings rests on the interplay between two types of uncertainty that agents...

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...

Recently, both theoretical and experimental literatures have incorporated the ability of strategic players to communicate verbally prior to choosing their actions. We design an experiment to show how and why presence and type of communication matters. We use a multilateral bargaining setting,...