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Economic theory suggests that gasoline retail markets are prone to collusive behavior. Oligopoly market structures prevail, market interactions occur frequently, prices are highly transparent, and demand is rather inelastic. A recent sector inquiry in Germany backed suspicions of tacit collusion...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009515979
We use a novel data set with exact price quotes from virtually all German gasoline stations to empirically investigate how a temporary variance in local market structure - induced by restricted opening hours of specific players - affects price competition. We focus on stations selling gasoline...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011572420
In this note we analyze the sustainability of collusion in a game of repeated interaction where firms can price discriminate among consumers based on two types of customer data. This work is related to Liu and Serfes (2007) and Sapi and Suleymanova (2013). Following Sapi and Suleymanova we...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010343547
We analyze the effects of better algorithmic demand forecasting on collusive profits. We show that the comparative statics crucially depend on the whether actions are observable. Thus, the optimal antitrust policy needs to take into account the institutional settings of the industry in question....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012990230
As self-learning pricing algorithms become popular, there are growing concerns among academics and regulators that algorithms could learn to collude tacitly on non-competitive prices and thereby harm competition. I study popular reinforcement learning algorithms and show that they develop...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012661268
collusive price that is set by the cartel to increase the acquirer's profit from its claim on the upstream margin. …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012297609
Many cartels are formed by individual managers of different firms, but not by firms as collectives. However, most of the literature in industrial economics neglects individuals' incentives to form cartels. Although oligopoly experiments reveal important insights on individuals acting as firms,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012886259
communication. Using a repeated, asymmetric capacity constraint price game, we show that, in line with theory, a partial cartel is … sufficient to increase market prices for all firms. Moreover, we find that prices of cartel insiders and outsiders are not … necessarily on the same level what contradicts common theoretical predictions. This is because communication allows cartel members …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011897162
We analyze firms' ability to sustain collusion in a setting in which horizontally differentiated firms can price-discriminate based on private information regarding consumers' preferences. In particular, firms receive private signals which can be noisy (e.g., big data predictions). We find that...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011892956
, especially for the focus of cartel screening. …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011892961