企业合谋、取证难度与监管选择

Firm Collusion,Evidence Collection,and Regulatory Policies

数字时代下政府对企业合谋的调查取证愈发困难。受此启发,本文从政府调查取证难度视角切入建立博弈模型,考察行业利润与取证难度这两类重要的市场环境因素对政府监管的边界及其在调查政策与宽恕政策这两类监管手段之间的权衡取舍。研究表明,与传统考察单一市场环境因素下最优监管政策的研究不同,将两类市场环境因素同时纳入分析后,最优监管政策的边界具有新特征,具体表现为监管政策可能随市场环境的变化呈现往复性。随后,本文通过一系列比较静态分析探讨了单一最优监管政策的适用范围如何随市场中企业数量、政府可收取的罚金限额以及政策执法成本等因素变化,并探讨了政府同时使用调查政策与宽恕政策这两类政策的条件。

Detecting firm collusion becomes increasingly difficult for the government in the digital era.Inspired by this fact,this article develops a dynamic model from the perspective of the difficulty of evidence collection to explore how government's choice between the investigation policy and the leniency policy depends on the industry profit and the government's effectiveness of evidence collection.Existing studies focus on a single market environment factor and explore the optimal regulatory policy.We show that the optimal regulatory policy generates new features when multiple market environment factors are considered.Specifically,we show that the optimal policy may exhibit reciprocation as the market environment changes.Through a series of comparative static analyses,we explore how the optimal regulatory policy varies with respect to the number of firms,the maximum fines that the government is able to charge,and the costs incurred by government in administering and enforcing the regulatory requirements.We also provide conditions under which it is optimal for the government to adopt the investigation policy and the leniency policy simultaneously.