Essays on the economics of explicit collusion.
详细信息
文摘
CHAPTER 1 with Robert C. Marshall,Leslie M. Marx and Lily Samkharadze): Buyer Resistance for Cartel versus Merger: Procurement practices are affected by uncertainty regarding suppliers costs,the nature of competition among suppliers,and uncertainty regarding possible collusion among suppliers. Buyers dissatisfied with bids of incumbent suppliers can cancel their procurements and resolicit bids after qualifying additional suppliers. Recent cartel cases show that cartels devote considerable attention to avoiding such resistance from buyers. We show that in a procurement setting with the potential for buyer resistance,the payoff to firms from forming a cartel exceeds that from merging. Thus,firms considering a merger may have an incentive to collude instead. We discuss implications for antitrust and merger policy. CHAPTER 2: Collusive Price Announcements with Strategic Buyers: The international vitamins cartel that operated in the 1980s and 90s issued coordinated public price announcements in an attempt to influence prices. This was done in an environment where buyers had the ability to take incremental actions to increase competition among the sellers. A particularly striking feature of the price announcements was their arrival in gradual increments which,in turn,served to raise transaction prices gradually. Motivated by these observations,this paper constructs a two period dynamic model of explicitly) collusive price announcements,featuring a buyer who can at a cost) increase competition in the procurements it conducts by qualifying a non-cooperative "outside" seller. In this setting,the paper shows that there exists an explicitly collusive mechanism that for an interesting range of parameter values exhibits gradually increasing price announcements,resulting in transaction prices that rise gradually. Moreover,the cartel in our model obtains payoffs greater than those under competition by submitting bids that are completely indistinguishable from non-cooperative bids. Thus,the paper not only formalizes the notion that a cartel may raise prices gradually to counter buyer "resistance",but also highlights the role of a cartels price announcements in doing so. Understanding the latter aspect of collusive pricing is of particular interest because issuing public price announcements can be consistent even with non-cooperative conduct. CHAPTER 3: Collusion in Auctions with Endogenous Quantity: A Numerical Exploration: The effects of the presence of a non all-inclusive bidding ring on the outcome of endogenous demand procurements is explored. We build on Hansen 1988),where a buyer with a publicly known demand curve conducts a procurement,and the quantity transacted is a function of the bids. In a first-price procurement FPP) the per unit transaction price equals the lowest bid and the quantity transacted corresponds to that price. The transaction price and quantity are determined analogously in a second-price procurement. Numerical results show that irrespective of the underlying demand curve,the buyer and the non-cartel bidder prefer the endogenous demand FPP over the endogenous demand SPP. However,while the cartel prefers the SPP over the FPP for relatively inelastic demand curves,for sufficiently elastic demand curves it prefers the FPP over the SPP. The numerical exercises also suggest that although the payoff for two out of three sellers to form a cartel is lower in a FPP than an SPP when demand is relatively inelastic,when demand is sufficiently elastic,the incentive to form such a cartel is higher in an FPP than an SPP.