Structures de marché et pratiques facilitant la collusion une approche par la théorie des jeux répétés

Agricultural and food industries have been largely involved in cartel activities (Vitamins, citric acid, lysine, sugar. . .) for the last decade. This article aims at understanding how these cartels have succeeded in implementing and enforcing collusive agreements. First I show that repeated games are the best theoretical framework to analyze collusion. This theory allows to identify the market structures that facilitate collusion. It also allows to evaluate much better the role of some practices inside a cartel, like exchanges of information, price wars or excess of capacity. Then repeated games are applied to the lysine case to provide some insights on the observed behaviors of lysine cartel members.