Actually I’m going to add to your reading list: “ A Study of Cartel Stability: The Joint Executive Committee, 1880-1886” By Rob Porter (northwestern) That pap

Actually I’m going to add to your reading list: “ A Study of Cartel Stability: The Joint Executive Committee, 1880-1886” By Rob Porter (northwestern) That paper is a classic and I hope porter gets the Nobel prize for the work he has done. In that paper, we actually know for sure that there was collusion. Porter is trying to assess how hard it was to sustain collusion using the data. (One thing you are not crediting in your website is that collusion is hard to sustain bc all of the colluders have the incentive to cheat!) It takes a lot of assumptions and serious econometric chops to make the analysis credible. That paper is 40 years old but what you’re really trying to do with your project is called “structural industrial organization.” It’s been around in the economics literature for a long time. It’s my field. It’s hard. If you want a recent overview which still won’t answer the question the way you wanted to, get “the handbook of industrial organization” edited by hortacsu et al, or the book draft “empirical methods in industrial organization” by aguirregabiria (who is at U Toronto!) or “quantitative techniques for competition and antitrust” by Davis and Garcés. Good luck.