Chloé Le Coq

Fines, Leniency and Rewards in Antitrust: An Experiment

This paper reports results from an experiment studying how fines, leniency programs and reward schemes for whistleblowers affect cartel formation and prices. Antitrust without leniency reduces cartel formation, but increases cartel prices: subjects use costly fines as (altruistic) punishments. Leniency further increases deterrence, but stabilizes surviving cartels: subjects appear to anticipate harsher times after defections as leniency reduces recidivism and lowers post-conviction prices. With rewards, cartels are reported systematically and prices finally fall. If a ringleader is excluded from leniency, deterrence is unaffected but prices grow. Differences between treatments in Stockholm and Rome suggest culture may affect optimal law enforcement.

Does opponents’ experience matter? Experimental evidence from a quantity precommitment game ☆

This paper investigates why subjects in laboratory experiments on quantity precommitment games consistently choose capacities above the Cournot level – the subgame-perfect equilibrium. We argue that this puzzling regularity may be attributed to players’ perceptions of their opponents’ skill or level of rationality. We first show theoretically that it is the case by modelling a two-stage game of capacity investment and pricing with bounded rational players. We then design an experiment in which we use the level of experience as a proxy for the level of rationality and match subjects with different levels of experience. We find significant differences in behavior depending on opponents’ experience; moreover, players facing inexperienced players tend to choose higher capacities than they would otherwise.

Economic Scarcity and Consumers’ Credit Choice

This paper documents that increased scarcity right before a payday causally impacts credit choices. Exploiting a transfer system that randomly assigns the number of days between paydays to Swedish social welfare recipients, we find that low educated borrowers behave as if they are more present-biased when making credit choices during days when their budget constraints are exogenously tighter. As a result their default risk and debt servicing cost increase significantly. Access to mainstream credit or liquidity buffers cannot explain our results. Our findings highlight that increased levels of economic scarcity risk to reinforce the conditions of poverty.

Price caps and fluctuating demands in electricity markets: Experimental evidence of competitive bidding

This paper reports results from a laboratory experiment designed to test how competitive behavior is sensitive to price cap and demand level in a uniform price auction. Several features of the electricity markets inspire the experimental design. Two treatments with different price caps are considered and demand is high in certain periods, and low in others. In addition the market is characterized by excess capacity regardless of the demand level and competitive outcome is predicted. Although attempts to collude do take place, these fail to increase market prices in any substantial way. Despite this, inefficiencies do occur as the attempts at colluding imply that marginal costs fail to equalize across firms. This allocative inefficiencies appear to be more severe, both when the demand is high and when the price cap is high.