Robust Collusion with Private Information

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Miller, David A.
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California San Diego
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ECONOMIC STUDIES
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0034-6527
• DOI: 10.1093/restud/rdr035
• 发表日期: 2012
• 页码: 778-811
• 关键词: price wars; repeated games; limitations; mechanisms; EFFICIENCY; THEOREM; STABILITY

摘要

The game-theoretic literature on collusion has been hard pressed to explain why a cartel should engage in price wars, without resorting to either impatience, symmetry restrictions, inability to communicate, or failure to optimize. This paper introduces a new explanation that relies on none of these assumptions: if the cartel's member firms have private information about their costs, price wars can be optimal in the face of complexity. Specifically, equilibria that are robust to pay-off irrelevant disruptions of the information environment generically cannot attain or approximate efficiency. An optimal robust equilibrium must allocate market shares inefficiently and may call for price wars under certain conditions. For a two-firm cartel, cost interdependence is a sufficient condition for price wars to arise in an optimal robust equilibrium. That optimal equilibria are inefficient generically applies not only to collusion games but also to the entire separable pay-off environment-a class that includes most typical economic models.