Vertical price-fixing arrangements include agreements by manufacturers to set minimum or maximum resale (i.e., retail) prices for their products. Minimum resale price-fixing is often termed resale price maintenance. Direct agreements to maintain resale prices are per se illegal in the United States and subject to “hard-core restriction” in Europe. In both places, however, it is possible for manufacturers to achieve de facto resale price maintenance through indirect means—for example, by refusing to deal with retailers who discount their goods or by offering rebate programs that gear rebate amounts to pricing levels. Those indirect means are especially difficult for courts to sort out when the vertical pricing arrangements are combined with other vertical restraints, such as geographic exclusivity deals, service and parts agreements, promotional agreements, and so on.

Maximum vertical price-fixing is at least prima facie pro-competitive, since it appears designed to keep prices to consumers low. It is therefore generally judged on a case-by-case basis, with the court balancing the pro- and anticompetitive effects of the agreement in question against each other. (This case-by-case standard of evaluation is known in U.S. law as the rule of reason, and it contrasts with the per se standard, which permits no such balancing.)

State-mandated and state-supervised vertical price-fixing schemes—such as state price controls on auto insurance or on hospital charges—are immune from federal antitrust prosecution under U.S. law. In contrast, EU member states enjoy no such broad “state action immunity” from European competition law. Government sponsored price-fixing schemes at the U.S. federal or EU-wide level (e.g., agricultural price supports) do not violate domestic antitrust laws but may be challenged as protectionist by other countries through the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The economic effects of vertical price-fixing are complex, but economists generally agree that at least some vertical price-fixing could be efficient and pro-competitive. An example of such price-fixing might be a resale price maintenance program, put in place by the manufacturer of a certain brand-name appliance, that guarantees adequate profit margins for the brand’s retailers and lets them attempt to capture market share from one another via nonprice competition. Such nonprice competition might include the provision of excellent and attentive service by sales staff armed with informative promotional brochures in well-stocked retail showrooms. The price maintenance program’s limits on intrabrand price competition would have the long-term effect of enhancing the brand’s reputation for quality and service, which in turn would enhance inter-brand competition. Moreover, without price maintenance in place, low-service discount retailers could free ride on the costly services provided by others. Consumers could get their information from the salesperson in the comfortable showroom but then actually purchase their appliances from the free-riding low-service discount warehouses. Thus, in the long run, without price support, excellent service would be driven out of the market, and the brand’s ability to compete with other brands on quality and service would be diminished.

Resale price maintenance might also serve to secure margins for small-volume retailers who, without some such guarantee, would be disinclined to devote space to the product. Here, again, intrabrand competition is curtailed to secure distribution channels that facilitate more vigorous inter-brand competition. Where the prospect of enhanced inter-brand competition is minimal, however—as in the case of a manufacturer with market power in the product being sold—the anticompetitive effects of resale price maintenance may dominate.

Maximum price-fixing keeps down costs to consumers. While it may impose burdens on retailers, those burdens may not be injurious to competition, since retailers who find the maximum resale price burdensome can in many cases simply switch to a different supplier. Moreover, in situations in which manufacturers grant geographically exclusive distribution rights to retailers (perhaps to retain control over the secondary markets for parts, service, and repairs), maximum price-fixing can prevent the “local monopolists” from gouging consumers. Finally, maximum price-fixing can limit the total damage to consumers from the repeated markups that occur when all levels of the distribution chain—manufacturer, wholesaler, and retailer—are in the hands of firms with significant market power.

Internationally, price-fixing has been common through the ages. OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), for example, is a well-known decades-old cartel that sets its production levels cooperatively with an eye toward keeping oil prices high. OPEC is protected from prosecution mainly because it is a multicountry organization headquartered in Vienna, Austria. Austria does not have antitrust laws that bind multinational organizations, and the international legal doctrine of sovereign immunity prevents any country from being sued by the courts of another country without its consent. It has been argued, however, that OPEC’s price-fixing practices could be attacked through the WTO, to which the OPEC member countries belong.

Oil is not the only commodity that has been the victim of price-fixing practices. An unusual number of global cartels fixing prices on lysine, vitamins, graphite electrodes, sorbates, sodium gluconate, construction, computer memory chips, marine construction, and citric acid have been criminally prosecuted. Those cartels inflicted billions of dollars of losses on consumers, raising prices from 30 to 100 percent during the course of the conspiracies. The cartels were prosecuted vigorously in several countries. Criminal fines paid by companies in half a dozen of the cases exceeded $100 million, to which were added billions of dollars in payments of private claims to customers alleging economic damages. Executives from Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, England, France, Switzerland, Italy, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Korea have been convicted, fined, and in some cases jailed for price-fixing violations.

Richard A. Posner, Antitrust Law, 2nd ed. (2001); W. Kip Viscusi, John M. Vernon, and Joseph E. Harrington, Jr., Economics of Regulation and Antitrust, 4th ed. (2005).