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Does anyone with knowledge of the industry care to estimate how much money these companies could make using such a scheme? Considering how often these sorts of

Does anyone with knowledge of the industry care to estimate how much money these companies could make using such a scheme? Considering how often these sorts of stories pop up (once in a while -- maybe a few times a year), and how profitable I would expect to be, I bet price-fixing happens way more often than once in a while. I wouldn't be surprised if it were the norm amongst big electronics manufacturers for most products. I don't expect raising penalties to be effective at stopping this -- they're settling anyway. It's so profitable and so hard to catch that probably most companies would rather take the risk. If there were a better way of enforcing it, it might work.

zapman449 15y ago
The big problem is in proving the collusion. It's just as easy, and mostly legal to send signals to your competitors through the marketplace... release a new model with foobaz feature at a higher pricepoint, see how the competitors react... if they add foobaz feature, and stay close to your higher pricepoint, you're safe, and legal. If they undercut, you can undercut to match. Just look at the price delta for those TV's with Netflix streaming vs those without. You can't tell me it costs $300ish to add the parts to make this work. Wireless chips cost a few cents... the screens already have a CPU in them to handle everything, so add a few cents, or maybe $1 to add a better CPU... Do I have specific evidence? no.