Conscious Parallelism Law and Legal Definition
Conscious Parallelism refers to a path that one business may take and competitors follow suit. A business may decide to raise the price of its products, and all competitors consequently raise the prices of their products also. This is an unspoken agreement and there is no consensus between the individual businesses, but still everyone follows the leader. All the competitors realize the greater amounts of benefits they are going to reap as long as no one opposes the hike. Generally, this kind of self imposed increased pricing cannot be successfully challenged before a court of law because eventually there will be a lack of evidence to prove any wrongdoing. This is because the businesses have no written/oral agreement to increase the prices; it is more or less a voluntary act. There is no collusion between the competitors to do this.
