this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
12 points (100.0% liked)

UK Politics

3097 readers
156 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

Yeah, externalities create opportunities for coordinated price behaviour. It's implicit price fixing in a way that would be illegally anti-competitive if made explicit. The CEO of EE/tesco/next or whoever can just go "due to input costs we are forced to pass on price increases to consumers" and all their peer companies can safely bump up prices, knowing that they aren't going to undercut them on price. The companies all get higher margins and the consumer gets screwed. Without the externality they'd have no idea about the pricing strategy of peers and would have to price competitively to retain or grown market share.