Other forms: cartels
A cartel is a group of firms agreeing to fix prices between them. A price-fixing cartel, break up the cartel, a drug cartel.
It is illegal in most jurisdictions because it removes the competition that keeps prices honest, and competition authorities offer leniency to the first member that confesses — which is a deliberate use of the prisoner's dilemma. OPEC is a cartel of states rather than firms. Note drug cartel, which borrows the word for criminal organisations that also divide markets between them.
1nouncartelA group of firms agreeing to fix prices between them.
“The oil-producing countries formed a cartel to keep prices high.”
cartel is a price-fixing group.
German Kartell was used in this sense from 1871, from French cartel, a written agreement or challenge, from Italian cartello, a placard, from carta, paper. A cartel was first a written pact.
Latin
charta
Italian
cartello
French
cartel
German
Kartell
English, today
cartel
Built from
In the business sense, German Kartell, first used by Eugen Richter in 1871 in the Reichstag. In the political sense, which was the vehicle for this metaphor, the English sense, like the German sense, was borrowed from French cartel in the sixteenth century, from Italian cartello, diminutive of carta (“card, page”), from Latin charta.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA