 Government-Assisted Oligopoly Coordination? A Concrete CaseSvend Albæk,
Peter Møllgaard and
Per Overgaard ()
No 1997-03, CIE Discussion Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. Centre for Industrial Economics Abstract: Danish ready-mixed concrete is produced in regional oligopolies. Firms rely on price discrimination through secret discounts. The antitrust authority interprets this as lack of competition and has decided to activate its chief weapon against dormant competition: To make the market more transparent it now regularly publishes list prices and discounts of 5-7 firms and two grades of concrete in three regions. Following initial publication, average prices of reported grades increased by 15-20 percent while other prices increase by a mere 1-2 percent. The paper investigates whether this may be due to a business upturn, capacity constraints, etc., but none of these seem to have much explanatory power. In addition, prices of various non-reported grades moved in line with the general price level suggesting that a better explanation is the facilitation of tacit coordination brought about by the antitrust authority. Keywords: competition policy; tacit collusion; observability (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in: Journal of Industrial Economics, December 1997, 45(4), 429-443 There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kud:kuieci:1997-03 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CIE Discussion Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. Centre for Industrial Economics �ster Farimagsgade 5, Building 26, DK-1353 Copenhagen K., Denmark. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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