IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/halshs-00755569.html

Optimal Collusion with Limited Liability

Author

Listed:
  • Etienne Billette de Villemeur

    (GREMAQ - Groupe de recherche en économie mathématique et quantitative - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Laurent Flochel

    (CRA - Charles River Associates International - Charles River Associates International)

  • Bruno Versaevel

    (EM - EMLyon Business School, GATE Lyon Saint-Étienne - Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon - Saint-Etienne - ENS de Lyon - École normale supérieure de Lyon - Université de Lyon - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - UCBL - Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 - Université de Lyon - UJM - Université Jean Monnet - Saint-Étienne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

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 which either structural conditions, financial considerations, or institutional circumstances set a lower bound, possibly negative, to firms' profits. For a large class of repeated games we show that, when the limited liability constraint binds, there exists an infinity of multi-period punishment paths that permit firms to implement the optimal collusive strategy. The usual front-loading scheme is only a specific case and an optimal punishment profile can take the form of a price asymmetric cycle. We characterize the situations in which a longer punishment does not perform as a perfect substitute for more immediate severity. In this case, the lowest discount factor that permits collusion is strictly higher than without the limited liability constraint, which hinders collusion.

Suggested Citation

  • Etienne Billette de Villemeur & Laurent Flochel & Bruno Versaevel, 2013. "Optimal Collusion with Limited Liability," Post-Print halshs-00755569, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00755569
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1742-7363.2013.12015.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Konov, Joshua Ioji / JK, 2013. "Enhancing Markets (i.e. Economies) Transmissionability to Optimize Monetary Policies’ Effect," MPRA Paper 46950, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;

    JEL classification:

    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
    • D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection
    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00755569. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.