Information sharing in oligopoly

This chapter reviews the theoretical literature on information sharing in oligopoly, and discusses recent contributions that extend the traditional multilateral model to encompass the possibility of bilateral sharing agreements. In the first part of the survey we revisit the early insights of the literature, stressing the role of demand vs price competition and of common vs private values; then, following more recent contributions, we reinterpret the most celebrated results in terms of the properties of the informational structure. Then, in the second part of the survey, we discuss in some detail the bilateral model of information sharing, stressing the role of signals’ correlation for the emergence of information sharing in equilibrium and its effect on the architecture of sharing networks. We finally discuss the emergence of core–periphery networks when firms possess asymmetric information.