# Cartel
An economic cartel use a non-public agreement to restrict the supply or fix the price of an asset. A cartel is a formal type of [market-manipulation](market-manipulation.md). Cartels are considered to be against the public interest because of the potential [asymmetric-information](asymmetric-information.md) to reduce trust in [markets](market.md).

Crypto exchanges operators act as economic cartel which can distort [price formation](price-formation.md). See [stablecoin](stablecoin.md).

## References
1. Akerlof, George A. "The market for “lemons”: Quality uncertainty and the market mechanism." In Uncertainty in economics, pp. 235-251. Academic Press, 1978.
1. Lefevre, Edwin. 2004. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. Vol. 175. John Wiley & Sons.
1. Dhawan, Anirudh, and Talis J. Putnins. 2020. ‘A New Wolf in Town? Pump-and-Dump Manipulation in Cryptocurrency Markets’. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3670714.
1. Hamrick, JT, Farhang Rouhi, Arghya Mukherjee, Amir Feder, Neil Gandal, Tyler Moore, and Marie Vasek. 2018a. ‘An Examination of the Cryptocurrency Pump and Dump Ecosystem’. http://ssrn.com/paper=3303365.
1. *———. 2018b. ‘The Economics of Cryptocurrency Pump and Dump Schemes’.
1. Kamps, Josh, and Bennett Kleinberg. 2018. ‘To the Moon: Defining and Detecting Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dumps’. Crime Science 7 (1): 18.
1. Lefevre, Edwin. 2004. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. Vol. 175. John Wiley & Sons.
1. Li, Tao, Donghwa Shin, and Baolian Wang. 2019. ‘Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump Schemes’. Available at SSRN 3267041.
1. Xu, Jiahua, and Benjamin Livshits. 2019. ‘The Anatomy of a Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump Scheme’. In 28th USENIX Security Symposium, 1609–25.