Search results for "Collusion"
showing 10 items of 20 documents
Can Euribor be fixed?
2020
The manipulation of Euro Interbank Offered Rate (Euribor) is a problem with great impact on international financial markets. This paper focuses on two aspects of the Euribor benchmark rate for the period 2004–2018: the specific features that make the Index more vulnerable to manipulation and the potential for Index manipulation over the studied period. To address the first aspect, we examine the range and the standard deviation of daily quotes, as well as the panel banks’ quote submissions to the Euribor administrator, the maximum and minimum quotes and the daily variation of submissions. As a result, we found a group of five banks with similar and extreme submission patterns, which might b…
Mafiosi, politici, pentiti
2007
La ricerca sociologica in tema di criminalità organizzata di tipo mafioso, si caratterizza per un vuoto teorico che riguarda la figura dei collaboratori di giustizia. Personaggi ingombranti per tutti – per i magistrati, per i politici, per i mafiosi irriducibili, per i loro stessi familiari – sembra che per gli ex-uomini d’onore non vi siano possibilità di reinserimento in una condizione di vita normale. Nonostante la loro riconosciuta utilità, difficilmente si riesce a non considerarli ancora come mafiosi e a non nutrire nei loro confronti perplessità e sospetti. Questo, e altro, emerge dai risultati di una indagine sulla percezione sociale dei collaboratori di giustizia in Sicilia, che me…
Are Low Prices Compromises Collusion Guarantees? An Experimental Analysis of Price Matching Policies
2001
In this paper we experimentally test the ability of Price-Matching Guarantees (PMG) to rise prices above the competitive level. We implement three different treatments of symmetric duopolies to check the effect of PMG both as a market institution and as a business strategy. In the absence of any low-price guarantee, prices get close to the Bertrand-Nash equilibrium although in the 50 rounds of the experiment no full convergence is obtained. The existence of PMG as an institution in a market where firms decide only about prices results in a clear collusive outcome as all markets quickly and fully converge to the collusive prediction. If we allow subjects to decide whether they adopt price ma…
“Me lo offre un caffè?”: Una ricerca qualitativa sulla ‘collusione di strada’ a Palermo [“Would you offer me a coffee?”: A qualitative research on ‘s…
2016
Il presente lavoro si propone come studio pilota sulla collusione in terre di mafia. I suoi oggetti di interesse sono Palermo e i “suoi” posteggiatori “abusivi”, figure oggi aggrovigliate al panorama geo-politico della città di cui parlano le strade, gli accadimenti mediatici e la cronaca giudiziaria del capoluogo siciliano. Ci siamo in tal senso chiesti: chi sono questi soggetti sociali? E quali sono le motivazioni della loro presenza ipertrofica in una città come Palermo? Grazie ai dati raccolti attraverso 21 “interviste da strada”, possiamo affermare che il problema è complesso e, come afferma Leoluca Orlando, riguarda posteggiatori e posteggianti, in uno stretto intreccio di collusioni …
Collusion Constrained Equilibrium
2018
First published: 01 February 2018 This is an open access article licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License 4.0 (http://econtheory.org) We study collusion within groups in noncooperative games. The primitives are the preferences of the players, their assignment to nonoverlapping groups, and the goals of the groups. Our notion of collusion is that a group coordinates the play of its members among different incentive compatible plans to best achieve its goals. Unfortunately, equilibria that meet this requirement need not exist. We instead introduce the weaker notion of collusion constrained equilibrium. This allows groups to put positive probability on alternatives …
Bank competition and multimarket contact intensity
2021
Abstract This paper analyzes the effect of multimarket contact on bank competition. We propose a completely new multimarket contact indicator that not only considers the existence of contacts between banks, but also their intensity, by analyzing the strength–weakness position of banks in terms of branch numbers in comparison to their rivals in the markets where they coincide. We test the new indicator empirically in the context of the Spanish banking sector. The main results suggest a negative relationship between market power and the number of multimarket contacts, rejecting the hypothesis of tacit collusion in the Spanish banking sector. However, the result changes completely when we cons…
Environmental taxation, information precision, and information sharing
2022
We analyze how environmental taxes should be optimally levied when the regulators and firms face costs uncertainties in a Stackelberg-Cournot game. We allow linear-quadratic payoffs functions coupled with an affine information structure encompassing common and private information with noisy signals. In the first period, the regulator chooses the intensity of emissions taxes in order to reduce externalities. In the second period, facing industry-related and firm-specific shocks, firms compete in the marketplace as Cournot rivals and choose outputs. We show that, given costs uncertainties with non-uniform quality of signals across firms, the regulator sets differentiated tax policy. We also e…
The paradox of (Inter)net neutrality: An experiment on ex-ante antitrust regulation✰
2022
Abstract Net neutrality has been the most relevant and heavily debated Internet regulation policy of the last decade. Net neutrality aims to prohibit discrimination between data packages in terms of content, origin, destination, or type of equipment used. However, the Big Tech companies, sheltered by the net neutrality policy, have flourished. They now have the power to exclude minor companies, and therefore their contents, from the Internet market in de facto defiance of the net neutrality principle. Academic results regarding this net neutrality paradox are still ambiguous. To represent the current Internet market distortions and analyze a potential tool to adjust and strengthen the net n…
The Relative Efficacy of Price Announcements and Express Communication for Collusion: Experimental Findings
2014
Collusion is when firms coordinate on suppressing competition, and coordination typically requires that firms communicate in some manner. This study conducts experiments to determine what modes of communication are able to produce and sustain collusion and how the efficacy of communication depends on firm heterogeneity and the number of firms. We consider two different communication treatments: non-binding price announcements and unrestricted written communication. Our main findings are that price announcements allow subjects to coordinate on a high price but only under duopoly and when firms are symmetric. While price announcements do result in higher prices when subjects are asymmetric, t…
Commitment of independent and institutional women directors to corporate social responsibility reporting
2018
This paper examines how independent and institutional women directors on boards affect corporate social responsibility (hereafter CSR) reporting. Most of the previous empirical evidence has shown a linear association between female directors and CSR disclosure, but to the best of our knowledge, no research has investigated the individual effect of independent and institutional female directors on CSR reporting. Therefore, the analysis of how the disclosure of CSR information is affected by independent and institutional women directors in a separate way merits our attention. Thus, we posit that there is a nonlinear association, concretely quadratic, between independent and institutional fema…