Managers and students playing Cournot – evidence from duopoly and triopoly experiments

Abstract

This article reports results from Cournot duopoly and triopoly experiments with different subject pools: German students, Malaysian students and Malaysian managers. We find that Malaysian managers perform significantly more collusively than Malaysian students. We also find that country matters insofar as German students perform significantly more collusively than their Malaysian counterparts.

Acknowledgements

Financial assistance was provided by Universiti Sains Malaysia (file number USM/R&I/PTS/001/09). We are grateful to Jörg Oechssler, Steffen Huck and Hans-Theo Normann for providing us with the computer program used in Huck et al. (2004).

Notes

¹We use data from duopoly treatments that differ from the triopoly treatments only with respect to the number of periods played. The length was different because we used the duopoly treatments from treatments of different experiments.

²5000–6000 RM ≈ 1500–1900 US$.

³In the duopoly treatment with German students that lasts 20 periods we present the mean quantity averaged over the middle 10 periods.