In the course of the liberalization of the European energy markets, the German government opted – diverging from all other European countries – for Negotiated Third-Party Access. In this article we analyze if this institutional regime could theoretically lead to efficient market outcomes. Above that, we empirically review whether certain aspects of the actual implementation, the publication of ...

We show that explicit cartels can implement market share allocations using a reporting framework that is considered to be legally acceptable for trade associations. This simple resolution of the market share cartel’s monitoring problem provides an explanation for the apparent prevalence of market share allocations relative to customer or geographic allocations by explicit cartels. Keywords: exp...

Agglomeration is a location pattern frequently observed in service industries such as hotels. This paper empirically examines if agglomeration facilitates tacit collusion in the lodging industry using a quarterly dataset of hotels that operated in rural areas across Texas between 2003 and 2005. We jointly model a price and occupancy rate equation under a switching regression model to endogenous...

The recent literature on oligopolistic third-degree price discrimination has been primarily concerned with rival firms' incentives to acquire customer-specific information and the consequences of such information on firm profitability and welfare. This literature has taken mostly a static view of the interaction between competing firms. In contrast, in this paper we investigate the impact of cu...

Scrutiny of potential mergers by the European Commission often focuses on unilateral effects or single firm dominance. But some cases have involved concerns over coordinated effects: the concern that the merger could increase the likelihood of consumer harm through tacit collusion by the reduced number of firms in the industry (this is known as collective dominance). The economic and legal issu...

We analyze the effect of the Byrd Amendment, which amended the US Tariff Act of 1930 to allow revenue from antidumping duties to be distributed to domestic import-competing firms. In an international duopoly framework it is shown that it urges the home firm to restrict output so that the foreign firm increases output and that revenue from the duties increases. Consequently, not only the home fi...

In the context of an infinitely repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma, we explore how cooperation is initiated when players communicate and coordinate through their actions. There are two types of players patient and impatient which are private information. An impatient type is incapable of cooperative play, while if both players are patient types and this is common knowledge then they can cooperate with...