Most people associate cartels with businesses fixing prices—but collusion can also happen on the buying side. Supermarkets might conspire to pay farmers less, hospitals could coordinate to reduce doctors’ fees, and employers in labor markets may fix wages or agree not to hire from each other. In this video, María Pilar Canedo (Academic Director of the OECD-GVH Regional Centre for Competition), Alessio Aresu (Case Handler, European Commission DG COMP), and Vivien Terrien (Vice-President, French Competition Authority) explain how buyer cartels operate in labor markets and illustrate their points with two real-world cases. This video builds on discussions from the Competition Lab for Judges on Horizontal Cooperation Agreements, organised by the OECD-GVH Regional Centre for Competition in Budapest in May 2025, with financial support from the European Commission.
