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In the absence of monopolistic control of the market/supply, I don't consider it any more meaningful than an attempt to optimize pricing. It's an important dif
by joshjdr 12y ago
In the absence of monopolistic control of the market/supply, I don't consider it any more meaningful than an attempt to optimize pricing.
It's an important difference, when a new seller can easily enter. Another commenter mentioned the price on a used book going up to $23 million based on algorithmic pricing. This creates an opportunity for another seller to sell the book at a reasonable price, while the two attempting to price collude sell nothing.
This is not the equivalent of a single entity acquiring an entire nations supply and distribution of oil to eliminate competition and raise prices, or five out of five major book publishers colluding on the pricing of new releases.
- wlesieutre 12y agoPrice fixing isn't when a single company controls the market and jacks prices up, it's when multiple competitors in a market get together and say "Instead of competing, let's collectively inflate our prices so that we make more money." As a recent example, LG, Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi, Sharp, Sanyo Epson, and others all colluded to keep prices on LCD panels artificially high for years. http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/november/lcd-price-fixing-conspiracy http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/november/lcd-price-fixi... http://www.ctvnews.ca/business/multimillion-dollar-settlements-reached-in-lcd-price-fixing-class-action-1.2000656 http://www.ctvnews.ca/business/multimillion-dollar-settlemen... I suppose book selling has a much lower barrier to entry than LCD manufacturing, but it's still tough to argue that coordinating prices with your competitors is an acceptable practice.