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Comment by SoftwareMaven | Hacker News Reader

I find the whistle-blowing aspect interesting (Chunghwa didn't get penalized because they blew the whistle).

Did Chunghwa participate in the price fixing? Did they get the benefits, and then throw their competitors under the bus? It would be an interesting way to disadvantage your competition if so.

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If memory serves, it is common that the whistle-blower gets a lower penalty/gets of entirely in antitrust cases, simply because if no one blows the whistle it is unlikely that there would be an investigation in the first place.

It should be a deterent to enter the illegal trust knowing that every member has an incentive to blow the whistle. That needs massive amounts of faith in competitors.

When I worked at Sony the only annual mandatory traing sessions were competition law training for everyone near marketing and the potential penalties were drummed in (upto 10% of global group turnover).

Prisoner's Dilemma anyone?

The Prisoner's Dilemma is different, since (here) there is no punishment if there is no betrayal, and betrayal is basically atomic.

No, it's the same. If no one talks, nothing bad happens. If one person talks they get to keep all the money and everyone else eats a big fine.

Look at the matrix in [1]. The matrix here is

    +-----------+
    | A,A | C,B |
    +-----------+
    | B,C | n/a |
    +-----------+

With (A=B) > C

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#Generalize...

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