Cartel
mutually beneficial collusion among competing corporations
A cartel is a group of independent market participants who collaborate with each other and avoid competing with each other in order to improve their profits and dominate the market. They seek to limit competition, fix prices, and increase prices by creating artificial shortages through low production quotas, stockpiling, and marketing quotas. Cartel behaviors can be either legal or illegal, but jurisdictions frequently consider cartelization to be anti-competitive behavior, leading them to outlaw or curtail cartel practices. Anti-trust law targets cartel behavior in markets.
The doctrine in economics that analyzes cartels is cartel theory. Cartels are distinguished from other forms of collusion or anti-competitive organization such as corporate mergers. Cartels are inherently unstable due to the temptation by members of the cartel to cheat and defect on each other by improving their individual profits, which may lead to falling prices for all members. Advancements in technology or the emergence of substitutes can undermine cartel pricing power, leading to the breakdown of the cooperation needed to sustain the cartel. Outside actors often respond to the undersupply of a good by bolstering their production of the good, investing in technologies that use the good more efficiently, or investing in substitutes.
Cartels can be organized on an international basis; examples of international cartels include the OPEC cartel to collude on oil production and the International Rubber Regulation Agreement to collude on rubber production.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q179216. The Library of Congress control number is sh85020496. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cartel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.