IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/29253.html

Hub and Spoke Cartels: Theory and Evidence from the Grocery Industry

Author

Listed:
  • Robert Clark
  • Ignatius Horstmann
  • Jean-François Houde

Abstract

Numerous recently uncovered cartels operated along the supply chain, with firms at one end facilitating collusion at the other – hub-and-spoke arrangements. These cartels are hard to rationalize because they induce double marginalization and higher costs. We examine Canada’s alleged bread cartel and provide the first comprehensive analysis of hub-and-spoke collusion. We make three contributions: i) Using court documents and pricing data we provide evidence that collusion existed at both ends of the supply chain, ii) we show that collusion was effective, increasing inflation by about 40% and iii) we provide a model explaining why this form of collusion arose.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert Clark & Ignatius Horstmann & Jean-François Houde, 2021. "Hub and Spoke Cartels: Theory and Evidence from the Grocery Industry," NBER Working Papers 29253, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29253
    Note: IO
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29253.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Holler, Emanuel & Rickert, Dennis, 2022. "How resale price maintenance and loss leading affect upstream cartel stability: Anatomy of a coffee cartel," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    2. Gaurab Aryal & Dennis J. Campbell & Federico Ciliberto & Ekaterina A. Khmelnitskaya, 2023. "Common Subcontracting and Airline Prices," Papers 2301.05999, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2023.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • L1 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance
    • L4 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies
    • L41 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - Monopolization; Horizontal Anticompetitive Practices
    • L42 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - Vertical Restraints; Resale Price Maintenance; Quantity Discounts

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:nbr:nberwo:29253. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    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.