Something’s Fishy: A Lesson on Market Structure and Collusion in the Canned Tuna Market
Socioeconomic portraits: Leveraging the production possibilities frontier to expand coverage of inequality and economic history in principles classes (Milliman & Kruggel)
September 17, 2025Common Scents Economics (Geerling, Grooms, & Mateer)
October 28, 2025This lesson uses a real-world example of price-fixing with a product that almost all students are familiar with to demonstrate the effects of market concentration and collusion. From 2006 to 2016, all three major canned tuna producers agreed to raise prices while hiding the price increase by decreasing the size of the containers. In this lesson, two suppliers sell packets of Swedish fish. Two rounds of play – one that is competitive and one in which the tuna sellers are allowed to collude – provide a powerful demonstration of the effects of high market concentration.
by Tom Flesher
Flesher, T. (2025). Something’s Fishy: A Lesson on Market Structure and Collusion in the Canned Tuna Market. Available online at Journal of Economics Teaching, DOI: 10.58311/jeconteach/326b11a5843a00672c901153d70221299ab15507
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