Price Fixing facts
While investigating facts about Price Fixing Definition and Price Fixing Examples, I found out little known, but curios details like:
The leading zipper brand, YKK, was fined $150 million euros for running not one, but four zipper price-fixing cartels.
how price fixing works?
From 2001 to 2006 manufacturers colluded in an international LCD price fixing conspiracy
Explain what price fixing is?
In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what does price fixing involve. Here are 31 of the best facts about Price Fixing Group Crossword Clue and Price Fixing Meaning I managed to collect.
what's price fixing?
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India is the only country that uses m.r.p.(Maximum Retail Price) system to fix a maximum price for products and commodities and a product cannot be sold for a price above its m.r.p.
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A bottle of Coca-Cola cost one nickel (5 cents) between 1886 and 1959. The price remained fixed with very little fluctuation. In 1953, Coca-Cola approached the US Treasury to request minting a 7.5 cent coin.
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In March 2011, Korea’s anti-trust regulator went to a Samsung facility in Suwon to raid the building, looking for evidence of possible collusion between the company and wireless operators to fix the prices of mobile phones. Before investigators could get inside employees began eating documents.
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There was a lightbulb cartel from 1924-1939 that fixed prices and forced planned obsolescence. It included many name brand manufacturers
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France has Fixed Book Prices. Retailers can only give a maximum 5% discount off the cover price. Argentina, Austria, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Korea and Spain have similar laws.
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In the lysine price-fixing scandal, the FBI used the same green lamp with a bugging device in every hotel room to record meetings. Informant Mark Whitacre noted that if there had been any female execs at the meetings they’d have probably spotted the same lamp, but none of the male execs ever did
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Canada fixes the price of dairy by law, costing Canadians an additional $300 in groceries per year — and you can go to prison for smuggling cheese across the border.
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Hoggmann-La Roche, a pharmaceutical company that made almost $10bn in 2014 was found out to be a part of a large conspiracy in 1999 to fix prices for vitamins, for a second time, and fined $500m, the first whistleblower was found out and sent to jail and so his wife committed suicide
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The most famous example of price fixing the Great Electrical Conspiracy in which GE and Westinghouse fixed the prices of turbines. The companies used the phase of the moon to determine the winner of government procurement auctions. Scheming tax payers out of 100's of million of dollars.
Why price fixing is bad?
You can easily fact check why price fixing is unethical by examining the linked well-known sources.
Someone tried to sue the Free Software Foundation for price fixing.
Comcast and other cable companies hold an oligopoly, meaning they fix prices to get more money - source
There was a Zip-Maker "cartel" comprised of German, British and Japanese zipper companies designed to fix worldwide zipper prices and share resources. The German company eventually ratted them all out and the companies were fined a combined 328 million Euros. - source
The Phoebus cartel was formed in 1924 by light bulb manufacturers who not only fixed prices, but also secretly signed a commitment pledging that light bulbs would be constructed such that their life expectancy would not exceed 1,000 hours.
The early maximum wage was later changed to determine a living wage. In 1389 the fixed wages were set to coincide with the price of food.
When is price fixing legal?
In 2002 Samsung, Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, and Elpida. Pleaded guilty to international price-fixing and payed the second largest criminal antitrust fine in U.S. history.
How would price fixing and collusion help producers?
There was world wide conspiracy in 2006 to fix prices of TFT-LCD, every thin screen, which ending with people going to jail and billions of dollars of fines in total.
Coca Cola cost a nickel from 1886 to 1959 because its President doubted that bottled soda would ever take off, and sold bottling rights at a fixed price forever. When bottled soda became popular, the company marketed Coca Cola as the nickel soda, preventing the bottlers from profiteering.
Braniff Airlines (that ad you see at the end of South Park) CEO Howard Putnam was told to fix prices by American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall. Putnam turned the phone recording over to the US Justice Department.
Samsung, LG and 4 Taiwanese companies were fined by multiple countries for price-fixing LCD screens.
In 1991 Nintendo got nailed for price fixing. The description of what they were doing sounds eerily similar to standard industry practice today.