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Recent empirical evidence shows that cartels are often asymmetric, while cartel theory suggests that firm symmetry is conducive to collusion. Including an indivisible cost of cartelization, we show that medium asymmetric market structures are more conducive to collusion, since they balance the small firms' incentives to stay in the cartel against the need to cover the cartel leaders' indivisible cartelization cost. Using an endogenous merger model, we also show that forbidding mergers leading to symmetric market structures can induce mergers leading to asymmetric market structures with a higher risk of collusion. Current antisymmetry merger policy can thus be counterproductive.

This paper concerns income taxation, commodity taxation, production taxation and public good provision in a multi-jurisdiction framework with transboundary environmental damage. We assume that each jurisdiction is large in the sense that its government is able to influence the world-market producer price of the externality-generating commodity. The decision-problem facing the government in each such jurisdiction is represented by a two-type model (with asymmetric information between the government and the private sector). We show how the possibility to influence the world-market producer price adds mechanisms of relevance for redistribution and externality-correction which, in turn, affect the domestic use of taxation and public goods. Finally, with the noncooperative Nash equilibrium as a reference case, we consider the welfare effects of policy coordination.

In their merger control, EU and the US have considered symmetric size distribution (cost structure) of firms to be a factor potentially leading to collusion. We show that forbidding mergers leading to symmetric market structures can induce mergers leading to asymmetric market structures with higher risk of collusion, when firms face indivisible costs of collusion. In particular, we show that if the rule determining the collusive outcome has the property that the large (efficient) firm benefits sufficiently more from collusion when industry asymmetries increase, collusion can become more likely when firms are moderately asymmetric.

Abstract
Within the policy debate, there is a fear that large incumbent firms buy small firms' inventions to ensure that they are not used in the market. We show that such "acquisitions for sleep" can occur if and only if the quality of a process invention is small; otherwise, the entry profit will be higher than the entry-deterring value. We then show that the incentive for acquiring for the purpose of putting a patent to sleep decreases when the intellectual property law is stricter because the profit for the entrant then increases more than the entry-deterring value does.