IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-04887311.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Punitive attitudes toward cartels: evidence from an experimental study

Author

Listed:
  • Béatrice Boulu-Reshef

    (UO - Université d'Orléans)

  • Constance Monnier

    (UP1 EMS - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - École de Management de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)

Abstract

This paper investigates the determinants of punitive attitude toward cartels and documents the factors underlying the support for harsher sanctions against these anticompetitive practices. The responses are collected in an experimental design in which participants are exposed to various levels of cartel-type agreement costs. This experimental manipulation allows us to highlight the fact that individuals are more punitive when they are victims of cartels that reduce their earnings. In addition, punitiveness increases in the number of cartels experienced. Overall, punitive attitudes toward cartels are influenced by socio-demographic variables such as age and education level. Being a man is also associated with higher punitiveness. Last, the perceived seriousness of cartels and cartel awareness, are associated with higher punitive attitudes.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Béatrice Boulu-Reshef & Constance Monnier, 2024. "Punitive attitudes toward cartels: evidence from an experimental study," Post-Print hal-04887311, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04887311
    DOI: 10.1007/s10657-024-09824-w
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Allain, Marie-Laure & Boyer, Marcel & Kotchoni, Rachidi & Ponssard, Jean-Pierre, 2015. "Are cartel fines optimal? Theory and evidence from the European Union," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 38-47.
    2. Steven Shavell, 2002. "Law versus Morality as Regulators of Conduct," American Law and Economics Review, American Law and Economics Association, vol. 4(2), pages 227-257.
    3. Catarina Marvão & Giancarlo Spagnolo, 2023. "Leniency Inflation, Cartel Damages, and Criminalization," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 63(2), pages 155-186, September.
    4. Muriel Niederle & Lise Vesterlund, 2007. "Do Women Shy Away From Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 122(3), pages 1067-1101.
    5. Charles A. Holt & Susan K. Laury, 2002. "Risk Aversion and Incentive Effects," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(5), pages 1644-1655, December.
    6. Emmanuel Combe & Constance Monnier, 2011. "Fines against Hard Core Cartels in Europe: The Myth of Overenforcement," Post-Print hal-03967038, HAL.
    7. Maria Bigoni & Sven-Olof Fridolfsson & Chloé Le Coq & Giancarlo Spagnolo, 2012. "fines, leniency, and rewards in antitrust," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 43(2), pages 368-390, June.
    8. Schoepfer, Andrea & Carmichael, Stephanie & Piquero, Nicole Leeper, 2007. "Do perceptions of punishment vary between white-collar and street crimes?," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 35(2), pages 151-163.
    9. Justus Haucap & Christina Heldman, 2023. "On the sociology of cartels," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 56(2), pages 289-323, October.
    10. Carmen García & Joan-Ramon Borrell & Juan Luis Jiménez & José Manuel Ordóñez-de-Haro, 2024. "Cartels, board gender composition and gender quotas," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 58(2), pages 283-320, October.
    11. Marcel Boyer & Rachidi Kotchoni, 2015. "How Much Do Cartel Overcharge?," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 47(2), pages 119-153, September.
    12. Payne, Brian K. & Time, Victoria & Gainey, Randy R., 2006. "Police chiefs' and students' attitudes about the Miranda warnings," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 34(6), pages 653-660.
    13. Haucap, Justus & Heldman, Christina & Rau, Holger A., 2024. "Gender and cooperation in the presence of negative externalities," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 147(C), pages 148-169.
    14. Holtfreter, Kristy & Van Slyke, Shanna & Bratton, Jason & Gertz, Marc, 2008. "Public perceptions of white-collar crime and punishment," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 50-60, March.
    15. Constance Monnier-Schlumberger & Emmanuel Combe, 2020. "Why Managers Engage in Price Fixing? An Analytical Framework," Post-Print hal-03967048, HAL.
    16. Harrington, Joseph E., 2022. "The Anticompetitiveness of a Private Information Exchange of Prices," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    17. Applegate, Brandon K. & Cullen, Francis T. & Fisher, Bonnie S., 2002. "Public views toward crime and correctional policies: Is there a gender gap?," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 89-100.
    18. Constance Monnier-Schlumberger & Emmanuel Combe, 2019. "Public Opinion on Cartels and Competition Policy in France: Analysis and Implications," Post-Print hal-03967056, HAL.
    19. Marcel Boyer & Rachidi Kotchoni, 2015. "How Much Do Cartel Overcharge? (The "Working Paper" Version)," CIRANO Working Papers 2015s-37, CIRANO.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Boulu-Reshef Béatrice & Monnier-Schlumberger Constance, 2025. "Do Sanctions or Moral Costs Prevent the Formation of Cartel Agreements?," Review of Law & Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 21(2), pages 283-321.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Yui Law & Sinchit Lai & Ning Liu, 2025. "Leniency experiments: an evaluation of external validity," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 59(1), pages 19-76, February.
    2. Boulu-Reshef Béatrice & Monnier-Schlumberger Constance, 2025. "Do Sanctions or Moral Costs Prevent the Formation of Cartel Agreements?," Review of Law & Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 21(2), pages 283-321.
    3. Sergio Pelaez & Juan David Gutiérrez, 2025. "The Gradual Impact of Sanctioning Cartels on Market Competition," Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade, Springer, vol. 25(1), pages 1-19, December.
    4. Haucap, Justus & Heldman, Christina & Rau, Holger A., 2024. "Gender and cooperation in the presence of negative externalities," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 147(C), pages 148-169.
    5. Georg Clemens & Holger A. Rau, 2019. "Do discriminatory leniency policies fight hard‐core cartels?," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 28(2), pages 336-354, April.
    6. Marcel Boyer & Thomas W. Ross & Ralph A. Winter, 2017. "The rise of economics in competition policy: A Canadian perspective," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 50(5), pages 1489-1524, December.
    7. Ran Jing & Jiong Gong & Fang Yi, 2020. "Antitrust Fines: Experiences from China," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 57(1), pages 167-187, August.
    8. Marcel Boyer & Anne Catherine Faye & Rachidi Kotchoni, 2017. "Challenges and Pitfalls in Cartel Policy and Fining," CIRANO Working Papers 2017s-20, CIRANO.
    9. Kim, Jeong Yeol, 2025. "Delegation and strategic collusion under antitrust policies: An experiment," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 90(C).
    10. Stephen Davies & Franco Mariuzzo & Peter L. Ormosi, 2018. "Quantifying The Deterrent Effect Of Anticartel Enforcement," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 56(4), pages 1933-1949, October.
    11. Marcel Boyer & Anne Catherine Faye & Éric Gravel & Rachidi Kotchoni, 2019. "Guiding Principles in Setting Cartel Sanctions (The Working Paper Version)," CIRANO Working Papers 2019s-18, CIRANO.
    12. Koki Arai, 2024. "Cartel agreement reached, but price not raised," International Journal of Economic Policy Studies, Springer, vol. 18(1), pages 259-282, February.
    13. Becchetti, Leonardo & Degli Antoni, Giacomo & Ottone, Stefania & Solferino, Nazaria, 2013. "Allocation criteria under task performance: The gendered preference for protection," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 96-111.
    14. Galliera, Arianna, 2018. "Self-selecting random or cumulative pay? A bargaining experiment," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 106-120.
    15. Tanja Artiga González & Markus Schmid & David Yermack, 2019. "Does Price Fixing Benefit Corporate Managers?," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(10), pages 4813-4840, October.
    16. Michalis Drouvelis & Julian C. Jamison, 2015. "Selecting public goods institutions: Who likes to punish and reward?," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 82(2), pages 501-534, October.
    17. Aaltio, Aapo & Buri, Riku & Jokelainen, Antto & Lundberg, Johan, 2025. "Complementary bidding and cartel detection: Evidence from Nordic asphalt markets," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 98(C).
    18. Zhang, Peilu & Zhang, Yinjunjie & Palma, Marco, 2018. "Social Norms and Competitiveness: My Willingness to Compete Depends on Who I am (supposed to be)," MPRA Paper 89727, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Dellaportas, Steven, 2013. "Conversations with inmate accountants: Motivation, opportunity and the fraud triangle," Accounting forum, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 29-39.
    20. Chen, Yan & Katuščák, Peter & Ozdenoren, Emre, 2013. "Why canʼt a woman bid more like a man?," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 77(1), pages 181-213.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • K21 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Antitrust Law
    • K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law
    • L41 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - Monopolization; Horizontal Anticompetitive Practices
    • M12 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - Personnel Management; Executives; Executive Compensation

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04887311. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.