Price fixing occurs naturally, study shows
Price fixing often occurs as a reaction to the natural swing of the buyers' market, rather than as the result of conspiracy.
Price fixing often occurs as a reaction to the natural swing of the buyers' market, rather than as the result of conspiracy.
Recently reported in the MIT Technology Review was the results of research modeling聽billions of interactions between buyers and sellers.聽The data would appear to undermine the argument used to defend invasive regulation, price-fixing, and anti-trust laws, which operate under the assumption that all inconvenient price increases must be the result of shady conspiracies by industry leaders.
I particularly loved the echoes of 鈥淪pontaneous Order鈥� in this quote. Of course, the writers of this particular article are still scratching their heads, unable to conceive of a world without regulatory and punitive market controls. Simply leaving market agents alone would be too radical, but at least they acknowledge that even new strategies would still be subject to the law of unintended consequences:
The聽abstract is available at the Cornell University Library.