This paper investigates the collusive and competitive effects of algorithmic price recommendations on market outcomes. These recommendations are often non-binding and common in many markets. We develop a theoretical framework and derive two algorithms that recommend collusive pricing strategies. Utilizing a laboratory experiment, we find that sellers condition their prices on the recommendation of the algorithms. The algorithm with a soft punishment strategy lowers market prices and has a pro-competitive effect. The algorithm that recommends a subgame perfect equilibrium strategy increases the range of market outcomes, including more collusive ones.

We report on experimental duopoly markets with heterogeneous goods. In these markets, sellers first choose capacities and then prices. While capacities remain fixed for either five or ten periods, prices have to be chosen in every period. The experiments starts with two sets of exogenously predetermined capacities. Independently of the distribution of capacities is, a unique pure-strategy in prices is subgame perfect. In equilibrium, capacities should correspond to the Cournot prediction. Given capacities, price-setting behavior is in general consistent with the theory. Average capacities converge above the Cournot level. Capacities converge at the industry level but are somewhat dispersed. Sellers rarely manage to cooperate.

The paper analyzes the effects of more intense competition on firms’ investments in process innovations. More intense competition corresponds to an increase in the number of firms or a switch from Cournot to Bertrand competition. We carry out experiments for two-stage games, where R&D investment choices are followed by product market competition. An increase in the number of firms from two to four reduces investments, whereas a switch from Cournot to Bertrand increases investments, even though theory predicts a negative effect in the four-player case. The results arise both in treatments in which both stages are implemented and in treatments in which only one stage is implemented. However, the positive effect of moving from Cournot to Bertrand competition is more pronounced in the former case.

This paper presents and tests a simple model of competitive and unilateral market power regimes that yields countercyclical markups. Following a decrease in demand in the short run, capacity-constrained firms may have a strong incentive not to lower their prices to the new competitive price. Demand shocks may introduce market power into a previously competitive market. Experimental posted offer markets support this conjecture with complete information on the market structure. With only private information, there appears to be a hysteresis effect concerning supracompetitive prices, i.e., markets with a history of supracompetitive pricing continue to generate supracompetitive prices following demand shocks. However, competitive markets also remain competitive following demand shocks when firms only have private information on costs and capacities.

We report on an experiment conducted to evaluate the effects of varying the way in which market information is presented to participants in laboratory Cournot duopolies. We find that the most standard variations, which are the use of a profit table or a profit calculator, yield indistinguishable performance. However, the addition of a best-response option to the profit calculator tends to increase aggregate output to the Cournot level and decrease the incidence of tacit collusion.

On the basis of evidence of past oligopoly experiments, we argue that there is often significantly more tacit collusion in Bertrand price-choice than in Cournot quantity-choice markets.

This paper examines the effects of competition in experimental posted-offer markets where sellers can confuse buyers. I report two studies. In one, the sellers offering heterogeneous goods can obfuscate buyers by means of spurious product differentiation. In the other study, sellers offer identical goods and make their prices unnecessarily complex by having multi-part tariffs. I vary the level of competition by having treatments with two and three- sellers in both studies, and having an additional treatment with five-sellers in one study. The results show that average complexity created by a seller is not different for the treatments with two, three and five sellers. In addition, market prices are highest and buyer surplus is lowest when there are two sellers in a market.

One key problem regarding the external validity of laboratory experiments is their duration: while economic interactions out in the field are often lengthy processes, typical lab experiments only last for an hour or two. To address this problem for the case of both symmetric and asymmetric Cournot duopoly, we conduct internet treatments lasting more than a month. Subjects make the same number of decisions as in the short-term counterparts, but they decide once a day. We compare these treatments to corresponding standard laboratory treatments and also to short-term internet treatments lasting one hour. We do not observe differences in behavior between the short- and long-term in the symmetric treatments, and only a small difference in the asymmetric treatments. We overall conclude that behavior is not considerably different between the short- and long-term.

We explore the effects of the provision of an information-processing instrument—payoff tables—on behavior in experimental oligopolies. In one experimental setting, subjects have access to payoff tables whereas in the other setting they have not. It turns out that this minor variation in presentation has non-negligible effects on participants’ behavior, particularly in the initial phase of the experiment. In the presence of payoff tables, subjects tend to be more cooperative. As a consequence, collusive behavior is more likely and quickly to occur.

We study the interaction of the effects of the strategic environment and communication on the observed levels of cooperation in two-person finitely repeated games with a Pareto-inefficient Nash equilibrium and replicate previous findings that point to higher levels of tacit cooperation under strategic complementarity than under strategic substitutability. We find that this is not because of differences in the levels of reciprocity as previously suggested. Instead, we demonstrate that slow learning coupled with noisy choices may drive this effect. When subjects are allowed to communicate in free-form online chats before making choices, cooperation levels increase significantly to the extent that the difference between strategic complements and substitutes disappears. A machine-assisted natural language processing approach then shows how the content of communication is dependent on the strategic environment and cooperative behavior, and indicates that subjects in complementarity games reach full cooperation by agreeing on gradual moves toward it.

We use laboratory experiments to examine the effect of firm size asymmetry on the emergence of price leadership in a price-setting duopoly with capacity constraints. Independent of the level of size asymmetry, the unique subgame perfect equilibrium of our timing game predicts that the large firm is the price leader. Experimental data show that price leadership by the large firm is frequent, but simultaneous moves are also often observed. Profit outcomes in the previous period affect the subjects’ decisions to announce or wait in a way that hampers convergence to the equilibrium. Furthermore, while both small and large firms display a strong tendency to wait to announce their price when firm size asymmetry is low, they often set prices early when size asymmetry is high. Prices are higher when price setting is sequential rather than simultaneous and when firm size asymmetry is high. Hence, price leadership by either type of firm has an anti-competitive effect that is more pronounced when the size difference between firms is large.

This paper tests the insiders’ dilemma hypothesis in a laboratory experiment. The insiders’ dilemma means that a profitable merger does not occur, because it is even more profitable for each firm to unilaterally stand as an outsider (Stigler, 1950; Kamien and Zang, 1990, 1993). The experimental data provides support for the insiders’ dilemma, and thereby for endogenous rather than exogenous merger theory. More surprisingly, our data suggests that fairness (or relative performance) considerations also make profitable mergers difficult. Mergers that should occur in equilibrium do not, since they require an unequal split of surplus.

We study the effects of price signaling activity and underlying propensities to cooperate on tacit collusion in posted offer markets. The primary experiment consists of an extensively repeated baseline sequence and a ‘forecast’ sequence that adds to the baseline a forecasting game that allows identification of signaling intentions. Forecast sequence results indicate that signaling intentions differ considerably from those that are counted under a standard signal measure based on previous period prices. Nevertheless, we find essentially no correlation between either measure of signal volumes and collusive efficiency. A second experiment demonstrates that underlying seller propensities to cooperate more clearly affect collusiveness.

We examine a common pool resource (CPR) where appropriations deteriorate the quality of the resource and, thus, its impact on the exploitation of the CPR. We focus on two settings: (i) firms use the CPR without abatement efforts, and (ii) abatement is allowed. We provide comparisons between these two settings and identify socially optimal appropriation levels. We find that (i) higher quality of the CPR could induce firms to overuse the resource, and (ii) first-period appropriations with abatement decrease in the regeneration rate. However, abatement induces an overuse of the resource when the quality of the CPR improves.

This paper examines the impact of cross-ownership on the strategic incentive of environmental corporate social responsibility (ECSR) within a green managerial delegation contract in a triopoly market engaged in price competition. It demonstrates that bilateral cross-ownership between insiders provides weak incentives to undertake ECSR, which has a non-monotone relationship with cross-ownership shares, while it provides strong incentives for outsiders, which increases the ECSR level as cross-ownership increases. It also compares unilateral cross-ownership and finds that a firm that owns shares in its rival has a greater incentive to undertake ECSR than its partially-owned rival, while an outsider has more incentive than firms in bilateral scenarios. These findings reveal that a firm's incentive to increase a market price through ECSR critically depends on its cross-ownership share, while it decreases environmental damage and increases social welfare when the environmental damage is serious.

The presence of nonzero conjectural variations in pollution abatement and output make emission taxes less effective with respect to reducing emissions. This has implications for the characterization of the optimal emission tax, particularly in an international context where there are large asymmetries in pollution intensities. A higher degree of collusion in output between polluting firms results in higher emissions taxes in the non-cooperative equilibrium. In contrast, a higher degree of collusion in abatement between polluting firms results in lower emissions taxes in the non-cooperative equilibrium. These results rely on the presence of nonzero conjectural variations and large asymmetries in pollution intensities across countries. The analysis is relevant to the design of international environmental policy, including cases where countries face increasing global competition and damages from rising global emissions.

We examine relations between strategic environmental policy, international R&D cartels and research joint ventures (RJVs), using a third-country model with Cournot duopoly. We indicate that forming an R&D/RJV cartel reduces governments' incentives to extract rent from consumers in the third country. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that social welfare under R&D cartels with full information sharing, i.e., RJV cartels, cannot surpass that under R&D/RJV competition, whereas forming an R&D/RJV cartel works well for environmental investment. Among the policy implications, we show that governments can maximize global welfare by collectively determining whether to allow R&D/RJV cartels.

Rare earth element extraction induces environmental damages and the balance problem. In this article, we show that recycling can challenge both problems in a two-period framework. We also find other results depending on the amount of scrap that can be recycled. If the recycling activity is not limited by available scrap, it does not change extraction in the first period. Environmental taxes on extracted quantities reduce extraction and favor recycling. But if the recycling is limited, the extractor reduces extraction in period one, adopting a foreclosure strategy, and environmental taxes can decrease recycling. In all cases, environmental taxes are never equal to the marginal damage from pollution, in order to take into account the recycling effect.

The deployment of cleaner production technologies is supposed to be crucial to mitigate the effect of climate change. The diffusion of technology from developed to developing countries can be done through different channels. It can be a business decision such as firms' relocation, opening of a subsidiary or the adoption of technology by southern firms, or it may be decided at the government level. This paper investigates, in a two-country model (North and South), the relationship between the diffusion of mitigation technologies, firms' relocation and the environment. We assume that both countries implement a carbon tax and there are two kinds of production technology used: a relatively clean technology and a dirty one. This paper theoretically shows that the technology diffusion by technology adoption, public transfer or subsidiary creation induces a decrease in relocation, while technology diffusion via purchasing dirty southern firms may increase the number of relocated firms. The paper also demonstrates that technology diffusion may have perverse effects in the long run. Indeed, total emissions may increase with technology diffusion since southern firms become more competitive.

We developed a trade model under imperfect competition to analyze the market power of U.S. and Chinese apple producers in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) market and their domestic markets and the elimination of ASEAN tariffs on U.S. and Chinese apples. We also formulated welfare functions for the United States, China, and ASEAN. Comparative static results are derived to analyze the effect of tariff changes on exports, domestic sales, and welfare. Based on the theoretical model, we derived an econometric specification and used the new empirical industrial organization literature to estimate the market power of U.S. and Chinese apple producers. The econometric model is simulated to quantify the effect of tariff removal on exports and domestic sales.