IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/unm/umagsb/2013011.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Antitrust as facilitating factor for collusion

Author

Listed:
  • Bos, A.M.

    (Organisation,Strategy & Entrepreneurship)

  • Letterie, W.A.

    (Organisation,Strategy & Entrepreneurship)

  • Vermeulen, A.J.

    (Quantitative Economics)

Abstract

We study collusion in an infinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma when firms' discount factor is private information. If tacit collusion is not feasible, firms that are capable of sustaining high prices may still be willing and able to collude explicitly. Firms eager to collude may signal their intentions when forming the agreement is costly, but not too costly. As antitrust makes explicit collusion costly in expected terms, it may in fact function as a signaling device. We show that there always exists a cost level for which explicit collusion is viable. Moreover, our analysis suggests that antitrust enforcement is unable to fully deter collusion.

Suggested Citation

  • Bos, A.M. & Letterie, W.A. & Vermeulen, A.J., 2013. "Antitrust as facilitating factor for collusion," Research Memorandum 011, Maastricht University, Graduate School of Business and Economics (GSBE).
    • Handle: RePEc:unm:umagsb:2013011
    DOI: 10.26481/umagsb.2013011
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl/ws/files/1588338/guid-5db76dda-7b1f-42cc-87d5-f4fb8eb6e251-ASSET1.0.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.26481/umagsb.2013011?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Joseph E. Harrington & Andrzej Skrzypacz, 2011. "Private Monitoring and Communication in Cartels: Explaining Recent Collusive Practices," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(6), pages 2425-2449, October.
    2. Martin, Stephen, 2006. "Competition policy, collusion, and tacit collusion," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 24(6), pages 1299-1332, November.
    3. Block, Michael Kent & Nold, Frederick Carl, 1981. "The Deterrent Effect of Antitrust Enforcement," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 89(3), pages 429-445, June.
    4. Feinberg, Robert M, 1980. "Antitrust Enforcement and Subsequent Price Behavior," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 62(4), pages 609-612, November.
    5. David Genesove & Wallace P. Mullin, 2001. "Rules, Communication, and Collusion: Narrative Evidence from the Sugar Institute Case," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(3), pages 379-398, June.
    6. Michael F. Sproul, 2009. "Antitrust and Prices," Ekonomicheskaya Politika / Economic Policy, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, vol. 2, pages 84-95, April.
    7. Fonseca, Miguel A. & Normann, Hans-Theo, 2012. "Explicit vs. tacit collusion—The impact of communication in oligopoly experiments," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 56(8), pages 1759-1772.
    8. Choi, Dosoung & Philippatos, George C, 1983. "Financial Consequences of Antitrust Enforcement," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 65(3), pages 501-506, August.
    9. McCutcheon, Barbara, 1997. "Do Meetings in Smoke-Filled Rooms Facilitate Collusion?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(2), pages 330-350, April.
    10. Stephen Davies & Matthew Olczak, 2008. "Tacit versus Overt Collusion Firm Asymmetries and Numbers: What's the Evidence?," Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Competition Policy (CCP) 2008-32, Centre for Competition Policy, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK..
    11. Harrington, Joseph E. & Zhao, Wei, 2012. "Signaling and tacit collusion in an infinitely repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 64(3), pages 277-289.
    12. Iwan Bos & Ronald Peeters & Erik Pot, 2013. "Do antitrust agencies facilitate meetings in smoke-filled rooms?," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(6), pages 611-614, April.
    13. Joseph E. Harrington, Jr. & Wei Zhao, 2012. "Signaling and Tacit Collusion in an Infinitely Repeated Prisoners' Dilemma," Economics Working Paper Archive 587, The Johns Hopkins University,Department of Economics.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Carsten J. Crede & Liang Lu, 2016. "The effects of endogenous enforcement on strategic uncertainty and cartel deterrence," Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) 16-08, School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK..
    2. Chowdhury, Subhasish M. & Crede, Carsten J., 2020. "Post-cartel tacit collusion: Determinants, consequences, and prevention," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 70(C).
    3. Jochem, Annabelle & Parrotta, Pierpaolo & Valletta, Giacomo, 2020. "The impact of the 2002 reform of the EU leniency program on cartel outcomes," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 71(C).
    4. Moritz Birgit & Becker Martin & Schmidtchen Dieter, 2018. "Measuring the Deterrent Effect of European Cartel Law Enforcement," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 18(3), pages 1-27, July.
    5. Loet Stekelenburg & Peter T. Dijkstra & Elianne F. Steenbergen & Jessanne Mastop & Naomi Ellemers, 2023. "Integrating Norms, Knowledge, and Social Ties into the Deterrence Model of Cartels: A Survey Study of Business Executives," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 63(3), pages 275-315, November.
    6. Napel, Stefan & Welter, Dominik, 2023. "Umbrella pricing and cartel size," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 91(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Iwan Bos & Ronald Peeters & Erik Pot, 2013. "Do antitrust agencies facilitate meetings in smoke-filled rooms?," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(6), pages 611-614, April.
    2. Chowdhury, Subhasish M. & Crede, Carsten J., 2020. "Post-cartel tacit collusion: Determinants, consequences, and prevention," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 70(C).
    3. Luke Garrod & Matthew Olczak, 2016. "Collusion, Firm Numbers and Asymmetries Revisited," Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Competition Policy (CCP) 2016-11, Centre for Competition Policy, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK..
    4. Mouraviev, Igor, 2014. "Explicit Collusion under Antitrust Enforcement," Center for Mathematical Economics Working Papers 494, Center for Mathematical Economics, Bielefeld University.
    5. Thomas Bourveau & Guoman She & Alminas Žaldokas, 2020. "Corporate Disclosure as a Tacit Coordination Mechanism: Evidence from Cartel Enforcement Regulations," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 58(2), pages 295-332, May.
    6. Robert M. Feinberg & Minsoo Park, 2015. "Deterrence Effects Of Korean Antitrust Enforcement On Producer Prices And Profit Margins," Journal of Competition Law and Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 11(4), pages 917-933.
    7. Kalyn Coatney & Jesse Tack, 2014. "The Impacts of an Antitrust Investigation: A Case Study in Agriculture," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 44(4), pages 423-441, June.
    8. Garrod, Luke & Olczak, Matthew, 2018. "Explicit vs tacit collusion: The effects of firm numbers and asymmetries," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 1-25.
    9. Fabian Dvorak & Sebastian Fehrler, 2024. "Negotiating Cooperation under Uncertainty: Communication in Noisy, Indefinitely Repeated Interactions," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 16(3), pages 232-258, August.
    10. Stephen Davies & Franco Mariuzzo & Peter L. Ormosi, 2018. "Quantifying The Deterrent Effect Of Anticartel Enforcement," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 56(4), pages 1933-1949, October.
    11. Granlund, David & Rudholm, Niklas, 2023. "Calculating the probability of collusion based on observed price patterns," Umeå Economic Studies 1014, Umeå University, Department of Economics, revised 13 Oct 2023.
    12. Basuchoudhary, Atin & Conlon, John R., 2013. "Silence is golden: communication, silence, and cartel stability," MPRA Paper 44246, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    13. Stefania Grezzana, 2016. "Lost In Time And Space: The Deterrence Effect Of Cartel Busts On The Retail Gasoline Market," Anais do XLIII Encontro Nacional de Economia [Proceedings of the 43rd Brazilian Economics Meeting] 158, ANPEC - Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia [Brazilian Association of Graduate Programs in Economics].
    14. Iwan Bos & Ronald Peeters & Erik Pot, 2017. "Competition versus collusion: The impact of consumer inertia," International Journal of Economic Theory, The International Society for Economic Theory, vol. 13(4), pages 387-400, December.
    15. Robert Clark & Jean-François Houde, 2014. "The Effect of Explicit Communication on pricing: Evidence from the Collapse of a Gasoline Cartel," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 62(2), pages 191-228, June.
    16. Aydin Çelen & Burak Günalp, 2010. "Do Investigations of Competition Authorities Really Increase the Degree of Competition? An Answer From Turkish Cement Market," Prague Economic Papers, Prague University of Economics and Business, vol. 2010(2), pages 150-168.
    17. Harrington, Joseph E., 2017. "A theory of collusion with partial mutual understanding," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 71(1), pages 140-158.
    18. Aghadadashli, Hamid, 2020. "Let’s Collude," CEPR Discussion Papers 15241, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    19. Roux, Catherine & Thöni, Christian, 2015. "Collusion among many firms: The disciplinary power of targeted punishment," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 83-93.
    20. Joseph E. Harrington, Jr., 2004. "Cartel Pricing Dynamics in the Presence of an Antitrust Authority," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 35(4), pages 651-673, Winter.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • L40 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - General
    • L10 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:unm:umagsb:2013011. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Andrea Willems or Leonne Portz (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/meteonl.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.