Tacit collusion
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Learning to Coordinate: A Study in Retail Gasoline Open
This paper studies equilibrium selection in the retail gasoline industry. We exploit a unique dataset that contains the universe of station-level prices for an urban market for 15 years, and that encompasses a coordinated equilibrium trans…
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Artificial Intelligence and Collusion Open
The debate over whether, in the absence of overt communications, mere tacit coordination between competitors should be outlawed is neither new nor settled. Current technological developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) hav…
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Market Entry, Fighting Brands, and Tacit Collusion: Evidence from the French Mobile Telecommunications Market Open
We study a major new entry in the French mobile telecommunications market, followed by the introduction of fighting brands by the three incumbents. Using an empirical oligopoly model, we find that the incumbents’ fighting brand strategies …
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Airline Partnerships, Antitrust Immunity, and Joint Ventures: What We Know and What I Think We Would Like to Know Open
This paper offers an overview of the state of research on airline partnerships and related issues: antitrust immunity, and joint ventures. While at a high level the potential pro- and anti-competitive effects of various forms of airline pa…
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Anti-competitive effects of partial cross-ownership: Experimental evidence Open
In theory, partial cross-ownership affects product prices and consumer welfare negatively, but empirical evidence is highly controversial. For competition policy it is important whether such effects are substantial enough to cause action. …
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Price regimes in an energy island: Tacit collusion vs. cost and network explanations Open
In this paper, we explore the determinants of wholesale electricity prices in an energy island such as Sicily, by estimating a regime switching model with timevarying transition probabilities on daily data in the 2012-2014 period. Explanat…
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Remedies for algorithmic tacit collusion Open
There is growing evidence that tacit collusion can be autonomously achieved by machine learning technology, at least in some real-life examples identified in the literature and experimental settings. Although more work needs to be done to …
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Imperfect information, algorithmic price discrimination, and collusion* Open
We analyze the ability of firms to sustain collusion in a setting in which horizontally differentiated firms can price discriminate based on private information. Firms receive private, noisy signals regarding customers’ preferences. We fin…
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The effects of competition on medical service provision Open
We explore how competition between physicians affects medical service provision. Previous research has shown that, without competition, physicians deviate from patient‐optimal treatment under payment systems like capitation and fee‐for‐ser…
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Two-Sided Tacit Collusion: Another Step towards the Role of Demand-Side Open
In the context of agent-based simulation framework of collusion, this paper seeks for two-sided tacit collusion among supply-side and demand-side participants in a constrained network and impacts of this collusion on the market outcomes. T…
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Tacit Collusion of Pricing Strategy Game between Regional Ports: The Case of Yangtze River Economic Belt Open
We develop a game model to analyze the tacit collusion between regional ports under three different scenarios. In the first scenario, there is simultaneous pricing game between regional ports; this intends to depict pricing strategy adopte…
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Multimarket contacts and bank profitability: do diversification and bank ownership matter? Open
This study investigates the impact of multimarket contacts on bank profitability in the Vietnamese banking system from 2006 to 2015 using the system GMM. The findings indicate in general no evidence of the mutual forbearance hypothesis in …
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Dynamics of market making algorithms in dealer markets: Learning and tacit collusion Open
The widespread use of market‐making algorithms in electronic over‐the‐counter markets may give rise to unexpected effects resulting from the autonomous learning dynamics of these algorithms. In particular the possibility of “tacit collusio…
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A Proposal for a Structural Remedy for Illegal Collusion Open
It is proposed that competition authorities use a structural remedy for some convicted cartels. The remedy would have cartel member(s) sell productive assets such as capacity to other firms for the purpose of making the market more competi…
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How communication makes the difference between a cartel and tacit collusion: A machine learning approach Open
This paper sheds new light on the role of communication for cartel formation. Using machine learning to evaluate free-form chat communication among firms in a laboratory experiment, we identify typical communication patterns for both expli…
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Price Matching Guarantees and Collusion: Theory and Evidence from Germany Open
On May 27, 2015, the Shell network of gas stations in Germany introduced a Price Matching Guarantee (PMG) available to its card-carrying members. In the ensuing weeks, a series of attempts at tacit collusion took place, typically with stat…
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The Impact of Social Preferences on Supply Chain Performance: An Application of the Game Theory Model Open
Traditional supply chain literature on contracting only considers agents’ economic motivation. Nowadays, with the development of behavioral economics, social preference theory has been widely used in supply chain research. These social pre…
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Cross‐licensing agreements in presence of technological improvements Open
This study investigates the relationship between technologies that firms expect to achieve after cross‐licensing (CL) and their incentives for signing CL agreements in a multiproduct‐firm setting. Results indicate that if markets are bound…
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Tacit Collusion on Steroids: The Potential Risks for Competition Resulting from the Use of Algorithm Technology by Companies Open
Digitalization has a growing impact on everyone’s life. It influences the way consumers purchase products, read online news, access multimedia content, and even meet or interact socially. At the core of digital products lies algorithm tech…
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Interactions of market making algorithms Open
The widespread use of market making algorithms and the associated feedback effects may have unexpected consequences which need to be better understood. In particular the phenomenon of 'tacit collusion' in which the interaction of algorithm…
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EU COMPETITION LAW IN THE DIGITAL ERA: ALGORITHMIC COLLUSION AS A REGULATORY CHALLENGE Open
Guaranteeing fair competition has been a guiding principle of Union action since the beginnings of the European Economic Community. Anti-competitive activities in the internal market, such as agreements between undertakings, decisions by a…
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Private information, price discrimination, and collusion Open
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…
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"Guinea Pig Trials" Utilizing GPT: A Novel Smart Agent-Based Modeling Approach for Studying Firm Competition and Collusion Open
Firm competition and collusion involve complex dynamics, particularly when considering communication among firms. Such issues can be modeled as problems of complex systems, traditionally approached through experiments involving human subje…
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Maverick firms and merger policy Open
A “maverick firm” is one that behaves in a manner that differs from the industry norm. As a result they are perceived to present a barrier to tacit collusion and for that reason competition authorities can seek to prevent mergers that migh…
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Learning to Mitigate AI Collusion on Economic Platforms Open
Algorithmic pricing on online e-commerce platforms raises the concern of tacit collusion, where reinforcement learning algorithms learn to set collusive prices in a decentralized manner and through nothing more than profit feedback. This r…
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Re-Pricing through Disruption in Oligopolies with Tacit Collusion: A Framework for Abuse of Collective Dominance Open
This article proposes an understanding of abuse of collective dominance or shared monopolization that does not outlaw oligopolistic tacit collusion as such, but that reputes abusive a set of tactics adopted by tacitly colluding oligopolist…
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Public–Private Collusion Open
We study collusion between a public firm and a private firm facing linear demand and quadratic costs. We characterize the collusive outcome that results from Nash bargaining and compare it to the non-cooperative outcome. If the public firm…
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Strategic Alliance and Tacit Collusion, of Competitive Advantage Through Market Area, Product Innovation Cooperativa Café Timor and National Cooperative Business Association (CCT-NCBA) in Timor Leste Open
This study aims to prove that the implementation of strategic alliance and tacit collusion can increase the competitive advantage of CCT-NCBA in organic coffee production by developing market areas and product innovation.This study aims to…
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Self-Play Q-learners Can Provably Collude in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Open
A growing body of computational studies shows that simple machine learning agents converge to cooperative behaviors in social dilemmas, such as collusive price-setting in oligopoly markets, raising questions about what drives this outcome.…
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Development of competition in the market of light oil products: theory, problems and ways of their solution Open
It is substantiated that the development of competition in the market of light oil products is complex and controversial, due to a number of problems: reduction of domestic production and leadership of importers in the Ukrainian market of …