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Fields Changed

Registration

Field Before After
Study Withdrawn No
Intervention Completion Date April 19, 2022
Data Collection Complete Yes
Final Sample Size: Number of Clusters (Unit of Randomization) 50 clusters/duoplies
Was attrition correlated with treatment status? No
Final Sample Size: Total Number of Observations 100 subjects/firms
Final Sample Size (or Number of Clusters) by Treatment Arms 50 subjects/firms per treatment, 25 clusters/duoplies per treatment
Public Data URL https://osf.io/jnufw/
Is there a restricted access data set available on request? No
Program Files Yes
Program Files URL https://osf.io/jnufw/
Data Collection Completion Date April 19, 2022
Is data available for public use? Yes
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Papers

Field Before After
Paper Abstract Despite its empirical relevance, increasing returns to scale are understudied in experimental markets. We use Bertrand duopolies with increasing returns to examine the effects of two sharing rules on prices and collusive behavior: the symmetric rule (where each of the two firms that set the same price serves half of the market demand) and the winner-takes-all rule (where a fair randomization device decides which of the two firms serves the entire market). We hypothesized that market prices would be higher under the winner-takes-all rule because it provides a collusion mechanism that the symmetric rule does not. While we find that subjects under the winner-takes-all rule, as predicted, coordinate more than twice as often on one price compared to the symmetric sharing rule, we do not find that this increases market prices. This might be driven by the problem that subjects do not sufficiently coordinate on high prices. We report findings on alternation (an alternative collusion strategy) and intertemporal price adjustments in further analyses.
Paper Citation Andreas Orland (2022): "Sharing Rules in Bertrand Oligopolies with Increasing Returns," SSRN Working Paper 4273943.
Paper URL http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4273943
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