How are airports (publicly subsidized in many cases) not subject to any kind of monopoly laws/comsumer protections? Fixed prices across board for water/soda/gum ect… One company in many cases has exclusive contracts.
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Monopoly laws apply to an entire *industry*. I’ve never seen something like this myself, but suppose a major airport DID sign a contract with Hudson News that makes them the only place to buy bottled water in that airport. So long as some other company was competing on the *contract*, there wasn’t a monopoly problem. If Hudson News laid out an inefficiently high price in the contract, some other company could have outbid them.
Observing that every price in a particular setting is the same is not actually evidence of price fixing. In a perfectly competitive economy, you would expect every company to charge the exact same price. In particular, the price at which they make no economic profit. If they charged a higher price, nobody would buy from them. If they charged a lower price, the business wouldn’t be worthwhile. Price fixing is if all those companies made an agreement to charge a price higher than the efficient one. The only way to prove it is to show that representatives of those companies met and made such a deal.
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