The Oligopoly Problem, Trigger Strategies, and “Coordinated Effects”

In earlier work, Jonathan Baker and I explored what we called “non-purposive coordination” and the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines call “parallel accommodating conduct.”  Such conduct arises when oligopolists respond to one another’s competitive initiatives in ways that undermine competitive incentives but that are not driven by a goal of converging on a mutually understood outcome or penalizing departures from one.  Here I explore and modernize an approach th