How to Profit From a Cartel Without Joining One

Eric Fruits October 19, 2026

Truth on the Market View Original Source

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Adam Smith warned that people in the same trade rarely meet without the conversation turning to a scheme to raise prices. Antitrust enforcers on both sides of the Atlantic now suspect they can skip the meeting—a shared shareholder may do the job.

In May 2025, the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) backed a lawsuit alleging that BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street used their stakes in competing coal companies to coordinate output cuts. The following month, the European Commission fined Delivery Hero and Glovo for participating in a cartel facilitated by Delivery Hero’s minority stake in Glovo.

Testing whether ownership links foster collusion is tricky. Cartels are illegal, so researchers usually see only those that get caught. Those may look little like the ones that escape detection.

A recent working paper by Vincent Abraham, Florian Ederer, and Catarina Marvao sidesteps that problem with data from Sweden, where cartels remained legal until 1993. Firms had to disclose cartel agreements when authorities requested them. Failure to register carried penalties that included fines or up to six months’ imprisonment. The authors matched that registry with ownership records for publicly listed Swedish companies from 1985 to 1993.

Their key measure, a “profit weight,” captures how much a firm treats a rival’s profits as its own because they share owners or one holds shares in the other.

Read the full piece here.