Cartel Detection in Procurement Markets

Cartel detection is usually viewed as a key task of either competition authorities or compliance officials in firms with an elevated risk of cartelization. We argue that customers of hard‐core cartels can have both incentives and possibilities to detect such agreements on their own initiative through the use of market‐specific datasets. We apply a unique dataset of about 340,000 market transactions from 36 smaller and larger customers of German cement producers and show that a price screen would have allowed particularly larger customers to detect the upstream cement cartel before the competition authority.