The paper studies bidder behavior in simultaneous, continuous, ascending price auctions. We design and implement a ‘‘collusion incubator’’ environment based on a type of public, symmetrically ‘‘folded’’ and ‘‘item-aligned’’ preferences. Tacit collusion develops quickly and reliably within the environment. Once tacit collusion developed, it proved remarkably robust to institutional changes that ...

We aim at examining the interactions between collusion and renegotiation in a principal-supervisor-agent framework, in which the supervisor and agent can collude while the principal can subsequently renegotiate. Despite common sense and the findings in the literature that collusion and renegotiation are usually costly when considered separately, we find that they play a weakly positive role whe...

There is a tension between libertarians’ optimism about private supply of public goods and skepticism of the viability of voluntary collusion (Cowen 1992, Cowen and Sutter 1999). Playing off this asymmetry, Cowen (1992) advances the novel argument that the “free market in defense services” favored by anarcho-capitalists is a network industry where collusion is especially feasible. The current a...

This paper estimates the implicit model, especially the roles of size asymmetries and firm numbers, used by the European Commission to identify mergers with coordinated effects. This subset of cases offers an opportunity to shed empirical light on the conditions where a Competition Authority believes tacit collusion is most likely to arise. We find that, for the Commission, tacit collusion is a...

Digital fingerprinting is a technology for tracing the distribution of multimedia content and protecting them from unauthorized redistribution. Collusion attack is a cost effective attack against digital fingerprinting where several copies with the same content but different fingerprints are combined to remove the original fingerprints. In this paper, we investigate average and nonlinear collus...

This paper analyzes the joint design of innovation and competition policy. It focuses on collusion sustainability changes due to implementation of antitrust fines and R&D subsidies in an extension of a model by Miyagiwa (2009). Generic subsidies for R&D are found not to facilitate collusion, while additional subsidization to research joint ventures (RJVs) can be collusion facilitating. We also ...

In this comment the survey by Feuerstein is taken as a point of departure to discuss some of the key challenges facing collusion theory in its application to competition and trade policy. The main issue is one of robustness. It is discussed that the popular use of equilibria with Nash reversion leads to highly non-robust results and contrasts this with a recent approach aimed at detecting robus...

Researchers and commercial companies have made a lot of efforts on detecting malware in Android platform. However, a recent malware threat, App collusion, makes malware detection challenging. In App collusion, two or more Apps collaborate to perform malicious actions by communicating with each other, which makes single App analysis insufficient. In this paper, we first introduce Android securit...