This is an interim report on what has been called “the largest criminal investigation the Antitrust Division has ever pursued.” It provides preliminary information on the nature of the allegations, the global scope of the investigations, and the magnitude of damages

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...

In this paper we model cartel duration as a mixed proportional hazard model and condition on cartel characteristics such as the agency first detecting the cartel, industry, if it is a bid rigging or price fixing cartel, the number of countries affected, the affected sales, and measures of the...

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...

In 2012 the global struggle to suppress price-fixing cartels reached a milestone. For the first time, U.S. monetary penalties exceeded $50 billion and worldwide antitrust penalties surpassed $100billion.This paper describes trends in private recoveries and their role in deterring cartels. The...

Using the overcharge estimates for 333 cartel episodes, we evaluate the effect of cartel characteristics and changes in the market and legal environment on the magnitude of overcharges imposed by private cartels in the United States and other geographic markets as early as the eighteenth...

In this note, I assemble simple empirical evidence on the severity of monetary penalties on modern international cartels, focusing on whether there are systematic differences in severity between cases in which the government itself is the victim of overcharging versus cases where the brunt of...

This study identifies the determinants of coupon values at the brand level within the context of a complex marketing program. A two-equation, fixed-effects, panel-data model accounts for the bidirectional causality between brand prices and discount levels. The empirical model is fitted with data...

This report analyzes a large sample of U.S. grocery warehouse operators in 54 well defined grocery marketing areas. Almost all grocer retail chains with more than 40 supermarkets and $500 million in retail sales in 1990 are vertically integrated into wholesaling. More than four-fifths of the...

In this study we investigate whether changes in antitrust penalties issued by the Department of Justice have led to improved effectiveness of antitrust actions with respect to price-fixing over 1981-2001. We use effectiveness of antitrust enforcement documented by Bosch and Eckard (1991) and...