Cartels are illegal in India, as they are almost everywhere. They are subject to heavy fines. Why, then, do businesses frequently try to fix prices? Because doing so usually is profitable. On average cartels raise prices by more than 20%, and probably face less than a 25% chance of being caught...

This article is the first to analyze whether cartel sanctions are optimal. The conventional wisdom is that the current level of sanctions is adequate or excessive. The article demonstrates, however, that the combined level of current United States cartel sanctions is only 9% to 21% as large as...

Antitrust law provides treble damages for victims of antitrust violations, but the vast majority of private cases settle. The average or median size of these settlements relative to the overcharges involved has, until now, been only the subject of anecdotes or speculation. To ascertain what we...

This chapter examines anti-cartel enforcement in selected jurisdictions around the world, paying particular attention to the role of private court actions in attaining optimally deterring sanctions. The principal conclusions are as follows. There are numerous indicators that enforcement in North...

For criminal violations of the Sherman Act, although guided by federal sentencing guidelines, U.S. Department of Justice has great latitude in recommending corporate cartel fines to the federal courts, and its recommendations are nearly always determinative. In this paper, we analyze the...

When they were discovered in 1999, the 16 vitamins cartels were probably the largest, most harmful, and harshest sanctioned international cartels of the late 20th century. Still today, the vitamins cartels are cited by antitrust authorities as the outstanding example of an enforcement action...

This paper is an excerpt of a comprehensive examination of the global bulk vitamins cartels of the 1990s. In terms of its precision and breadth of coverage, the quantitative information now available on vitamins surpasses that of almost any other modern cartel. For example, the internal records...

This Article examines whether the current penalties in the United States Sentencing Guidelines are set at the appropriate levels to deter illegal price fixing cartels optimally. The authors analyze two data sets to determine how high on average cartels raise prices. The first consists of every...

GLOBAL PRICE FIXING (2nd Edition) was released by Springer at the end of 2006. This note reproduces a 2002 review of the first edition of the book by Prof. Douglas Greer. It is reproduced with the permission of the publisher of the Review of Industrial Organization