Does Multimarket Contact Facilitate Tacit Collusion? Inference on Conduct Parameters in the Airline Industry

Ciliberto, Federico and Williams, Jonathan (2010): Does Multimarket Contact Facilitate Tacit Collusion? Inference on Conduct Parameters in the Airline Industry.

Abstract

We nest conduct parameters into a standard oligopoly model. The conduct parameters are modeled as functions of multimarket contact. Using data from the US airline industry, 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.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Multimarket Contact, Collusion, Differentiated Products, Airport Facilities, Airline Industry
• Subjects: L - Industrial Organization > L1 - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance > L13 - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets

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