Bidder Collusion

Within the heterogeneous independent private values model, we analyze bidder collusion at first and second price single-object auctions, allowing for within-cartel transfers. Our primary focus is on (i) coalitions that contain a strict subset of all bidders and (ii) collusive mechanisms that do not rely on information from the auctioneer, such as the identity of the winner or the amount paid. To analyze collusion, a richer environment is required than that required to analyze non-cooperative behavior. We must account for the possibility of shill bidders as well as mechanism payment rules that may depend on the reports of cartel members or their bids at the auction. We show there are cases in which a coalition at a first price auction can produce no gain for the coalition members beyond what is attainable from non-cooperative play. In contrast, a coalition at a second price auction captures the entire collusive gain. For collusion to be effective at a first price auction we show that the coalition must submit two bids that are different but close to one another, a finding that has important empirical implicationsauctions, collusion, bidding rings, shill

Process Variation as a Determinant of Service Quality and Bank Performance: Evidence from the Retail Banking Study

Conventional wisdom in retail banking states that firm performance is dependent on higher average process performance. This paper refutes conventional wisdom and provides empirical evidence, which demonstrates that low process variation contributes significantly to firm performance. More specifically, this paper examines the effect of process variation, caused by process variability, on service quality and financial performance, as measured by customer satisfaction and price-to-earnings ratio. This paper estimates process variation and reveals large variation in rocesses, reflecting large variation in firm strategy and process design. The data is from the

Exploring Relations Between Decision Analysis and Game Theory

Many authors, including Cavusoglu and Raghunathan (2004. Configuration of detection software: A comparison of decision and game theory approaches. Decision Anal. 1(3) 131–148.) in this journal, have argued that proper modeling of the strategic interaction between players requires a game-theoretic approach as opposed to a decision-theoretic approach. We argue in this paper, however, that there are many environments in which decision analysis can deal with strategic interactions just as well, and we present equivalence results for such environments. These equivalence results allow the prescriptive decision analyst to use the standard tools that a sound decision analysis requires, including decision trees and sensitivity analysis, even when confronted with strategic settings. We further present two technical comments on the Cavusoglu and Raghunathan (2004) paper

Individual Accountability in Teams

We consider a team production problem in which the principal observes only the group output and not individual effort and in which the principal can only penalize an agent for poor performance if she has verifiable evidence that the agent in question did not fulfill his job assignment. In this environment, agents have an incentive to shirk. However, we show that by including monitoring in the agents' job assignments, the principal induces the agents to exert effort and achieves the first-best. In particular, even though equilibrium job assignments include monitoring, this serves only to provide incentives for effort, and agents do not engage in wasteful monitoring in equilibrium.Individual Liability, Moral Hazard in Teams

Antitrust leniency with multiproduct colluders

We use a global games approach to model alternative implementations of an antitrust leniency program as applied to multiproduct colluders. We derive several policy design lessons; e.g., we show that it is possible that linking leniency across products increases the likelihood of conviction in the first product investigated but reduces it in subsequent products. Thus, firms may have an incentive to form sacrificial cartels and apply for leniency in less valuable products to reduce convictions in more valuable products. Cartel profiling can mitigate this undesirable effect, but also reduces the probability of conviction in the first product investigated

Monotonicity of Solution Sets for Parameterized Optimization Problems

This paper uses results of lattice theory, convex analysis, and nonsmooth analysis to establish conditions for the existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibria when payoff functions are continuous but not quasi-concave. A class of economic games for which this theory is important is given.

Plus Factors and Agreement in Antitrust Law

Plus factors are economic actions and outcomes, above and beyond parallel conduct by oligopolistic firms, that are largely inconsistent with unilateral conduct but largely consistent with explicitly coordinated action. Possible plus factors are typically enumerated without any attempt to distinguish them in terms of a meaningful economic categorization or in terms of their probative strength for inferring collusion. In this Article, we provide a taxonomy for plus factors as well as a methodology for ranking plus factors in terms of their strength for inferring explicit collusion, the strongest of which are referred to as super plus factors