Why do consumer prices and wages adjust so slowly to changes in market conditions? The
rigidity or stickiness of price setting in business is central to Keynesian economic theory and …

We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model in which the typical industry colludes by
threatening to punish deviations from an implicitly agreed-on pricing path. We use methods …

Credit rating agencies (CRAs) have long held that reputational concerns discipline their
behavior. The value of reputation, however, depends on economic fundamentals that vary …

There are many economic problems which, when modelled as games of incomplete
information, give rise to many sequential equilibria, severely limiting the usefulness of the …

This paper examines a simple version of the conduct parameter method widely used in
empirical industrial organization and argues that the conduct parameter fails to measure …

An examination of collusive behavior: what it is, why it is profitable, how it is implemented,
and how it might be detected. Explicit collusion is an agreement among competitors to …

Detecting cartels Page 1 Harrington, Joseph E. Working Paper Detecting cartels Working Paper,
No. 526 Provided in Cooperation with: Department of Economics, The Johns Hopkins University …

In this article I develop a model of an infinitely repeated procurement auction with one buyer
and several sellers. The buyer can accumulate a backlog of unfilled orders which, similar to …

Most of the theoretical work on collusion and price wars assumes identical firms and an
unchanging environment, assumptions which are at odds with what we know about most …

We present a theory of collusive pricing in markets subject to business cycle fluctuations. In
the business cycle model that we adopt, market demand alternates stochastically between …