Logo
Munich Personal RePEc Archive

Does multimarket contact facilitate tacit collusion? inference on conduct parameters in the airline industry

Ciliberto, Federico and Williams, Jonathan (2012): Does multimarket contact facilitate tacit collusion? inference on conduct parameters in the airline industry.

Warning
There is a more recent version of this item available.
[thumbnail of MPRA_paper_39329.pdf]
Preview
PDF
MPRA_paper_39329.pdf

Download (865kB) | Preview

Abstract

We show that multimarket contact facilitates tacit collusion in the US airline industry using two complementary approaches. First, we show that the more extensive is the overlap in the markets that the two firms serve, i) the more firms internalize the effect of their pricing decisions on the profit of their competitors by reducing the discrepancy in their prices, and ii) the greater the rigidity of prices over time. Next, we develop a flexible model of oligopolistic behavior, where conduct parameters are modeled as functions of multimarket contact. We find i) carriers with little multimarket contact do not cooperate in setting fares, while carriers serving many markets simultaneously sustain almost perfect coordination; ii) cross-price elasticities play a crucial role in determining the impact of multimarket contact on collusive behavior and equilibrium fares; iii) marginal changes in multimarket contact matter only at low or moderate levels of contact; iv) assuming that firms behave as Bertrand-Nash competitors leads to biased estimates of marginal costs.

Available Versions of this Item

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact us: mpra@ub.uni-muenchen.de

This repository has been built using EPrints software.

MPRA is a RePEc service hosted by Logo of the University Library LMU Munich.