> then during spikes in demand (or alleged spikes in demand) they coordinate to keep the price from dropping.

Why would they need to coordinate to keep the price from dropping during a spike in demand? a spike in demand will obviously not be expected to lower prices regardless of collusion

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amy_petrik 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>Why would they need to coordinate to keep the price from dropping during a spike in demand?

They wouldn't you're right.

But I would expect for them to follow the sorts of behavior we've observed in other markets - egg prices, gasoline prices. When a spike occurs, even if as brief as a lightning strike, they will only very slowly drop prices, when in a purely capitalistic world the price drop ought to be equally fast - suggestive that the slow drop is a mutual agreed upon collusion. After all, it's in all sellers best interest to game that "consumers temporarily agreeable to scalping prices" as hard as possible, Nash equilibrium or whatever amongst sellers. Many such cases and more vicious and brutal punishments for such behavior would serve to benefit the common man, the final point and benefit of capitalism

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zozbot234 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, the industry is capacity limited so if there's a true spike in demand, prices will be high even absent any collusion. Especially if previous investment in expanding capacity has been lacking for many years.

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jagged-chisel 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To keep someone from undercutting others’ prices and causing a competitive pricing war.

Realistically, it wouldn’t be a meaningful drop to the consumer. But it’ll affect some executive’s ability to buy another unnecessary trinket.

	▲	zozbot234 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If the industry is at capacity (which it plausibly is, especially since HBM memory is made in the same facilities) then no one can physically "undercut" anyone else. Collusion works by artificially restraining supply of some valuable good; if there was genuine collusion at play, we'd probably be seeing companies make less of the expensive HBM (to push its price even higher; note that patent and other IPR restrictions can in fact have this effect, to some extent) and more of the comparatively cheap DRAM!