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Cartel Detection in Procurement Markets
Author(s) -
Hüschelrath Kai,
Veith Tobias
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
managerial and decision economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.288
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1099-1468
pISSN - 0143-6570
DOI - 10.1002/mde.2631
Subject(s) - cartel , procurement , competition (biology) , business , core (optical fiber) , industrial organization , task (project management) , incentive , upstream (networking) , german , margin (machine learning) , price fixing , collusion , microeconomics , commerce , economics , marketing , computer science , telecommunications , management , history , ecology , archaeology , machine learning , biology
Cartel detection is usually viewed as a key task of either competition authorities or compliance officials in firms with an elevated risk of cartelization. We argue that customers of hard‐core cartels can have both incentives and possibilities to detect such agreements on their own initiative through the use of market‐specific datasets. We apply a unique dataset of about 340,000 market transactions from 36 smaller and larger customers of German cement producers and show that a price screen would have allowed particularly larger customers to detect the upstream cement cartel before the competition authority. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.