Florian O.O. Wagener

Benefits of Market Collusion

In a recent study with Jeroen Hinloopen and Grega Smrkolj, Florian Wagener examines situations where allowing firms to fully collude achieves a higher total surplus than, say, only allowing them to cooperate in the R&D stage. This result is driven by the fact that under full collusion, there will be more work on "outlandish" products that are nowhere near the market stage, but which, when developed, generate positive welfare.

Florian Wagener's research focuses on destabilisation and regime shifts in dynamic economic situations. While at CESifo, he is planning to investigate the dynamic stability of international environmental agreements in the presence of tipping points.

Though born in Munich in 1970, Florian Wagener grew up in the north of the Netherlands, close to the historic city of Groningen. He took his PhD in Dynamical Systems at the University of Groningen in 1998. After a one-year postdoctoral stay at the Mathematics Institute of the University of Warwick, he joined the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics and Finance (CeNDEF) at the University of Amsterdam, where he is now Associate Professor. He also joined the Tinbergen Institute as a Fellow in 2006. In 2005, Florian Wagener was awarded a NWO "Vidi" research grant for his project "Structural Stability of Economic Dynamics".