News - Europe fines LCD companies €649 million for price fixing

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Six far-eastern LCD panel producers were fixing the prices of displays from 2001 to 2006.

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WTH??

So today's lesson is:

If you want to do something illegal (no matter how bad it is), do it in a group and when things get heated, be the first to tell.

As long as you aren't the last dude telling, you will get a benefit.

It's an intentional 'race to the bottom'. By giving massive incentive to the first to come forward about cartels, no company can trust another, since their self-interest alters from making more money, to keeping all their money, it makes cartels more difficult to form.

Of course, it's still ridiculous.

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Originally Posted by aidanjt

It's an intentional 'race to the bottom'. By giving massive incentive to the first to come forward about cartels, no company can trust another, since their self-interest alters from making more money, to keeping all their money, it makes cartels more difficult to form.

Of course, it's still ridiculous.

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Unless, there is a cartel on the court payments, in which case, the companies still win.

On the flipside from the perspective of the consumer it is better this way. Cartels are more likely to be broken up sooner because inevitably companies will rat each out sooner so the cartel doesn't last as long and therefore prices become competitive for you the consumer sooner.

If there was nothing like this in place it could take decades to come out or simply not come out at all.

Still I take all of you points that it is bad to reward really immoral cowardly behaviour.

But the real losers here were the consumers / corporations that got ripped off for years. However none of the fine will get distributed to them. In the long run the LCD manufacturers will need to recoup the fine and therefore will need to make more margin on current products to pay the fine. So the consumer suffers again. In the end the producers take a minimal hit, the consumer pays again and the European Commission takes all the money.

This would be much fairer if a rebate was given back to each purchaser for each LCD purchased but it would probably cost a fortune to administer.