Price-Fixing Overcharges: Legal and Economic Evidence
Preprint
- 1 November 2004
- preprint
- Published by Elsevier in SSRN Electronic Journal
Abstract
This paper is a survey identified hundreds of published social-science studies of private, hardcore cartels that contained 674 observations of long-run overcharges. The primary finding is that the median cartel overcharge for all types of cartels over all time periods is 25%: 18% for domestic cartels, 32% for international cartels, and 28% for all successful cartels. In addition, a survey of 24 final verdicts in decided U.S. horizontal collusion cases reveals an average median overcharge of 21% and an average mean overcharge of 30%. Outside the United States, 62 decisions of competition commissions cited median average overcharges of 29% and a mean of 49%. These findings suggest that U.S. and non-U.S. cartel penalties ought to be increased. Despite the evident increases in cartel detection rates and the size of monetary fines and penalties in the past decade, a good case can be made that current global anticartel regimes are under-deterring.Keywords
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