Price Coordination in the Digital Age: Do Some Companies Collude in Plain Sight?

Professor Leslie Marx details how a gasoline market used a digital platform to coordinate prices between dominant retailers, avoiding written and verbal communications

If the handful of companies controlling a market — say, gasoline — could meet in a ‘smoke-filled room’ and agree on price strategy, the result would likely be higher prices at the pump, higher profits for all the companies, and the consumer footing the bill. That’s roughly the Economics 101 definition of an oligopoly — a… read more