How are price fixing agreements unfair?

Abstract

Antitrust law is trapped in a labyrinth of its own making. The assumption that consumer welfare and efficiency is the sole concern of antitrust law conflicts with what people view as unfair about antitrust law. The present thesis advances the understanding of antitrust law by providing some theoretical considerations and empirical results of what people view as unfair regarding price-fixing agreements. People's attitudes towards price fixing were obtained through experimental surveys on Amazon Mechanical Turk in the United States. The empirical results suggest that people view it as unfair when they feel that businesses rip them off through unequal transactions, such as price fixing and other forms of collusive behavior. But there is more to it than that. The evidence also suggests that people's price-fixing attitudes vary depending on the circumstances. The empirical results suggest that people judge price fixing as a moral violation influenced by the dual entitlement principle and the double effect theory. Moreover, results suggest that people’s intuitions about price fixing are not static and move whenever the social and moral context changes.