In the seventies and eighties, the theory of exhaustible natural resources developed a branch, which was called the cartel-versus-fringe model, to characterize markets with one large coherent cartel and a big number of small suppliers named the fringe. It was considered appropriate to use the...

In this paper, we analyze the question of membership in a non-renewable resource cartel, with specific application to OPEC. One would expect the benefits of cartel membership to be positively related to the size of remaining reserves, while domestic petroleum consumption should be negatively...