The Impact of Cyclical Demand Movements on Collusive Behavior
John C. Haltiwanger and Joseph E. Harrington, Jr.
,
1
(
22
)
Rand Journal of Economics
89-106
April
1991
Abstract
Recent work by Rotemberg and Saloner (1986) investigates the effect of the business cycle on optimal collusive pricing by specifying that demand is subject to i.i.d. shocks. An implication of the i.i.d. assumption is that firms' expectations on future demand are unrelated to the current level of demand. We put forth a model that allows for both the level of current demand and firms' expectations on future demand to change over time; thus it captures two important properties of the business cycle.