o the competition prices
than would be the case with the prices of a single monopolist.

Sec. 5. The recognition of the advantages of limiting competition by
price tariffs, and the experience of the difficulty of maintaining
such tariffs, lead competing businesses to take further steps in the
curtailment of competition. Where a powerful trade opinion can be
focussed on an offender against the scale, where he can be boycotted
or otherwise subjected to punishment, and where outsiders can be
prevented from intruding into the trade, a common scale of profitable
prices can often be maintained with the verbal or even the tacit
consent of those concerned. This is the case in many manufactures
where the fixed and well-known character of the goods makes a close
price-list possible. Retail dealers in local markets are often able to
keep a close adherence to a rigid scale by the pure force of _esprit
de corps_. The price of bread, meat, milk, coals, and other articles
sold locally by well-known measures, is seldom, if ever, regulated by
free competition among the vendors. In articles where more depends
upon the individual quality of wares, and where a rigid tariff is less
easily fixed and less easily maintained, as in the case of vegetables,
fruit, fish, and groceries, trade agreements are less easy to
maintain. Still more difficult is it to maintain a tariff for articles
of dress or adornment of the person or the house, and in other
articles where the consumer is less confined to a narrow local market.

The general experience of manufacturing and mercantile businesses,
where each firm is closely confronted by other firms of similar
capacity and equipment at every point in the market, indicates an
increasing difficulty in maintaining prices at a profitable level.
Everywhere complaints are heard of a reckless use of the productive
power of machinery, of over-stocked markets, of a cutting of prices in
order to get business, and of a growing inability to make a living
rate of profit.

Sec. 6. The endeavour of a number of individual businesses in a trade to
fix and maintain a certain profitable scale of prices is constantly
frustrated. The introduction of new machinery enabling certain firms
to make a profit at prices below the tariff induces them to utilise
their full productivity, cut prices, and still sell at a profitable
price; others involved in the meshes of speculative production are
compelled to cut prices and effect sales