IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mee/wpaper/0306.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Distinguishable Patterns of Competition, Collusion, and Parallel Action

Author

Listed:
  • James L. Smith

Abstract

Alternative market structures are distinguishable by the degree of parallel action exhibited by producers. We show that the correlation between output levels varies systematically with the degree of interdependence among firms, and establish an ordering among alternative behavioral hypotheses (Cournot, Stackelberg, Edgeworth/Bertrand, collusion, and perfect competition). Because the ordering is invariant to the values of background parameters, statistical tests of market conduct may be possible even when the slopes of the demand curve and marginal cost curves are unknown. An application to the world oil market finds strong evidence of collusive behavior among OPEC members, but not elsewhere.

Suggested Citation

  • James L. Smith, 2003. "Distinguishable Patterns of Competition, Collusion, and Parallel Action," Working Papers 0306, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:mee:wpaper:0306
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://tisiphone.mit.edu/RePEc/mee/wpaper/2003-006.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    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:mee:wpaper:0306. 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: Sharmila Ganguly (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cemitus.html .

    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.