Collusion, competition and piracy

In this article we analyse firms' ability to tacitly collude on prices in an infinitely repeated duopoly game of vertical product differentiation. We show that firms collude if and only if their discount factor is high enough, that is, if they value future profits sufficiently. We also show that a lower cost of copying facilitates collusion but that a higher quality of the copy hinders collusion. Thus, the overall effect of these new characteristics of copies made by consumers is ambiguous.