caa a22 4500 469042737 CHVBK 20180323132815.0 cr unu---uuuuu 170328e19920301xx s 000 0 eng 10.1007/BF00354848 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)springer-10.1007/BF00354848 The bakers of Washington cartel: Twenty-five years later [Elektronische Daten] [Willard Mueller, Russell Parker] Craig M. Newmark challenges the findings of a 1965 Federal Trade Commission decision and Economic Report that a price fixing cartel increased bread prices in the state of Washington from the mid-1950s to 1964. Newmark believes prices were higher during the cartel's existence because retailers in the west had higher margins and that bakers in the west had higher wages and higher ‘normal' profits than elsewhere in the country. Newmark ignores evidence that the cartel had set the higher retailer margins in Washington and that the labor costs and profits of Washington bakers were not higher than elsewhere. The Washington bakers had inflated distribution costs and excess capacity prior to the cartel's breakup. This result is commonplace when a cartel stimulates costly nonprice competition, so that the higher prices of the cartel members end up primarily in higher unit cost. Finally, Newmark claims that the reason prices fell in 1965 was the entry of a significant size price cutter, not the demise of the cartel. What Newmark characterized as a ‘principal' entrant was actually a tiny, two-man operation, with less than a 1.0 percent market share. The record shows that this entrant did not trigger the precipitous price decline occuring when the cartel was destroyed. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992 Mueller Willard University of Wisconsin, 427 Lorch Street, 53706, Madison, Wi, U.S.A. aut Parker Russell Federal Trade Commission, USA aut Review of Industrial Organization Kluwer Academic Publishers 7/1(1992-03-01), 75-82 0889-938X 7:1<75 1992 7 11151 https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00354848 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00354848 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Mueller Willard University of Wisconsin, 427 Lorch Street, 53706, Madison, Wi, U.S.A aut NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Parker Russell Federal Trade Commission, USA aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Review of Industrial Organization Kluwer Academic Publishers 7/1(1992-03-01), 75-82 0889-938X 7:1<75 1992 7 11151 Metadata rights reserved Springer special CC-BY-NC licence nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-springer