In 1990, the USA Justice Department was investigating an incidence of covert price fixing in the airline industry. It seemed that certain airlines may signal fare increases to each other through the computer network of the industry's clearing house for fares. Through a process of hidden electronic negotiation, this would allow participating carriers to adjust their prices in concert so that the consumer had little chance of receiving competitive prices from different airlines for the same leg.
Price rigging is one of the principal ways in which foreign firms are excluded from Japan. This is supported by the preferential buying habits of Japan's many keiretsu families of companies, which are linked by a web of cross-shareholdings that can set the margins all the way from the factory to the shopkeeper's shelf and keep Japanese prices as much as 60% higher in Japan than in America.
In 1994 the European Union fined 16 European steelmakers a total of $117 million for flagrant violation of rules on price fixing and share markets for steel beams.
Price fixing is just another way of using futures markets. The dealer may agree to buy a certain quantity of a commodity of a specified quality at a given date, the price to be based on a futures market quotation (plus or minus an agreed amount) for a specified delivery contract at a date chosen by the buyer within a fixed period.