Hypothetical question: how do you get rid of a noncompliant cartel-like organization member



  • Shut off its access to supply?

    What if the noncompliant cartel-like member finds ways around the shut off valve closure?

    Oust the noncompliant member?

    Next.

    (Note inserted to help @JayHawkFanToo avoid apparent, or even just possible, leaps into reductionistic inferences of legal wrong doing being modelled: No intentional illegality or impropriety is assumed to be occurring in this hypothetical inquiry. 🙂 😞 )



  • What’s the difference in this context between cutting off supply and ousting? Do you to think Self talks directly to the ShoeCos?



  • @approxinfinity

    First, I am not talking about John Calipari, Sean Miller, Coach K, or any other actual coach here, or any actual shoe company here, or even the actual NCAA D1 college basketball industry, or whatever one should call it. I am speculating hypothetically about a hypothetical cartel regime (not specifying as basketball) in which distribution of net benefits to cartel members stemming from acquiring, developing and marketing a raw material, or alternatively, a human resource, serving as a basic input to a good or service, involved a member, or members, electing not to cooperate with the cartel’s agreed upon parceling out of that raw material, or human resource, because that distribution was asymmetric, and so less net beneficial to certain members that as a result, have grown noncompliant, or at least partially so.

    In short, I am hypothesizing a non specific cartel in order to try to explore and understand cartel dynamics first, before seeing if they might have any feasible fit coincident with college basketball recruiting dynamics. I am not yet sure that they do.

    Regarding a hypothetical coach talking directly with hypothetical shoecos about hypothetical talent distributions, I would doubt such would occur. My doubt results from a college coaching system reputedly dating back several decades involving a reputed tradition of coaching “motion plays” (see “College Sports, Inc.” by Murray Sperber, Professor Emeritus, Indiana University, 1990) to avoid, or manage, sensitive issues related to recruiting, etc. Recall this is reputedly a system in which head coaches are sometimes found not to have known about rather egregious infractions. So: in this hypothetical cartel thought experiment, if you will, it seems improbable to me, if we were to try to specialize it to college basketball recruiting, that head coaches and shoecos would directly discuss such things as hypothetical talent distributions. But as a layman and an outsider looking in at the reality of D1 college basketball and its recruiting processes, I would have no way of knowing.

    Regarding distinguishing between “cutting off supply” and “ousting” in this hypothetical, “cutting off supply” would involve reducing, then shutting off the supply of a raw material to a noncompliant cartel member, whereas “ousting” would imply removal of that member from the cartel.

    Again, at this point, I am not even sure that a cartel model has a feasible fit with D1 college basketball.

    It is just somewhere to start hypothetically to begin to try to search for a fitting explanation of recent recruiting phenomena.

    Oligopoly models might also be hypothesized.

    And other models as well.

    I picked cartels only because of the rather sharp asymmetries in distributions that to me seem strongly counter intuitive to a market with a flat playing field and one determined mostly by available rotation PT and coaching record.

    Were there a level playing field, and were the coaching record decisive, then for one example, one would now expect domestic OAD big recruits in the 6-9 to 7-0 range to be flocking to KU this season, because KU has none on the team this season, none signed for next season, and has a coach and program known for producing top big men that get drafted and make good livings in the NBA.

    It could be that all the long bigs waiting may in fact flock to KU in the late signing period, but a recent analysis by @konkeyDong, if I recall correctly, suggested that did not seem the case so far, anyway. So: it prompted me to hypothesize a bit. Hope this helps.



  • To your original post-case in point. The clippers former owner.





  • Hmmm. Simple answer, make them so displeased they want to remove themselves. But do not breach any contract / agreement when doing so.



  • By definition, a “cartel” is a voluntary group of “producers” (not “consumers”) created with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition, a de-facto monopoly if you will, so shutting off the supply does not affect them, right? They just keep on producing…and actually helps break the monopoly.

    Perhaps what you would need to do shut off is the distribution to the consumer, assuming the member in question does not have its own, and this is very difficult because all it has to do is lower the price and consumers will flock and independent distributors will flourish.

    Now, if you are talking about a group of consumer banded together to get a better product under more favorable terms then what you have is more of cooperative or alliance rather than a cartel, right?

    Better yet, can we just have a thread in plain English without using analogies that confuse the issue?

    Maybe the thread should be: Calipari cheats, we all know it, we cannot prove it, how do we stop it.



  • @jaybate-1.0 Shot in the dark. Maybe the tobacco enema would do the trick but I’ll have to take someone’s word for it? No first hand experience !!



  • @JayHawkFanToo

    Most producer oligopolies and producer cartels depend on raw material inputs that are sometimes sourced from still other producer oligopolies, or produce cartels. They also sometimes face what you might call consumer oligopolies and monopolies (e.g., Walmart/KMart) downstream.

    Producer Oligopolies and Producer Cartels over time either vertically integrate to control raw materials up stream, or to use their buying power to impose a regime of submissive producers upstream.

    Producer Oligopolies and Producer Cartels attempt to do something similar downstream, also.

    For instance, if you are an Oilco refining producer oligopoly, you work to create crude oil producer oligopolies and cartels like OPEC to control crude supply/price feeding into your refining oligopoly. And you work to create a variety of oligopolies/ cartels down stream to shape the valving of various stages of developed product. And when you refined product begins to grow food, make plastics, and power machines and appliances directly or indirectly, it maybe desirable to establish consumer oligopolies, etc. The game is to create as much “predictability” of supply and price as needed to ensure that revenues will not fluctuate so much that expenses and sunk costs and profits in controlling and operating the production/development/marketing stream are not threatened any where along the stream.

    The idea of a consumer is mostly used to describe folks at the end of a product development stream that buy and consume the end product.

    But its okay with me if you want to use it as you did. 🙂 😞

    Post Script: I want to make it explicitly clear that whether or not @JayHawkFanToo apparently alleges cheating, or not, @jaybate 1.0. hypothesizes above (and assumes that) that NO CHEATING or improprieties probably go on intentionally in the realm that I am hypothesizing about, though of course I have no insider knowledge one way or the other. Why @JayHawkFanToo would even draw such an insight, or make such a comment, puzzles me. Maybe he/she has insider information that I lack. For one thing, I do not recall seeing evidence suggesting that anything illegal goes on regarding the relationships involving schools, athletic departments, and their PetroShoeCo sponsors in the realm of activity that I am inquiring hypothetically into. Further, it would appear to be foolish to me for such organizations with such enormous sunk costs in such a system, and plenty of legal resources to approach interactions rationally, to behave in any way that was patently and intentionally illegal. I don’t understand why @JayHawkFanToo suggests that that might be the case. IMHO, it betrays a kind of naivety to leap to judgements about cheating and other improprieties regarding such organizations, simply because they are participating in a system that recently appears to yield asymmetries in talent distribution that do not seem to be readily explainable. Though a layman, I doubt that producer oligopoly, producer duopoly, or cartel-like organization is patently illegal in the case of NCAA, or NBA sports industry activity. If it were, this layman would assume it would long ago have been found illegal, for these organizations hardly operate in secret. IMHO, it also betrays some possible lack of knowledge about the nature of modern economic and political economic organization at the scale of the organizations involved in D1 College Basketball to somehow suggest that oligopolistic competition, or cartel-like regimes, or duopolies, or public-private associations and so on are some how fundamentally improper and illegal. They appear to this layman as simply certain forms among many forms of organization found in modern economy and political economy. They don’t seem illegal to me, rather they seem to produce certain asymmetric tendencies in distributions of net benefit and talent. It surprises me that @JayHawkFanToo reaches the thoughts that he/she does and that @JayHawkFanToo is apparently willing to dispense with hypothesizing and analysis and instead prefers to play judge and jury. As one layman to another board rat, I kind of doubt the wisdom of doing that. But I am sure am not going to tell another board rat what one can, or cannot post.

    Post Post Script: In the interest of posting clarity, I am even going to revise the title of my post to try to help @JayHawkFanToo along with this issue in the eventuality that my initial post lacked clarity.

    🙂 😞



  • @globaljaybird

    Yes, and then there is the tobasco sauce variation, also. 🙂


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