Maintaining Privacy in Cartels
传统观点认为卡特尔内部透明度促进合谋，但本文发现有时保护参与者隐私反而能提高利润，因为信息过多会帮助企业设计更有利可图的偏离行为，并给出了隐私最优的条件。
It is conventional wisdom that transparency in cartels--monitoring of competitors' prices, sales, and profits--facilitates collusion. However, in several recent cases cartels have instead worked to preserve the privacy of their participants' actions and outcomes. Toward explaining this behavior, we show that cartels can sometimes sustain higher profits when actions and outcomes are observed only privately, because better information can hinder collusion by helping firms devise more profitable deviations from the collusive agreement. We provide conditions under which maintaining privacy is optimal for cartels that follow a market-segmentation strategy.