A suggestion to Competition Commission Singapore (CCS)

A number of sectors (Petrol, Telco, Taxi etc) have price movements that are extremely highly correlated in terms of timing of price change. I.e. they change the prices at almost the same time (Think petrol prices).

They are able to do this because of the implicit understanding amongst the industry players not to rock the boat, i.e. the best strategy is to synchronize the price changes and avert a price war. All this can be done without meeting together to decide on a unified response (which is a crime). This behavior hurts consumer.

I have a suggestion to CCS. Implement a scheme whereby if one of the players were to change their price, there will be an automatic freezing of the competitors price change. This is to intentional create discord amongst the players so that the risk of a price change is magnified (i.e. losing market share).

Take the petrol station as an example. There are 4 companies – Esso, Shell, Caltex, SPC. If say Esso were to raise price, there will be an automatic price freeze of say 1 week on the other 3 companies. Raising the price before that is deemed collusion. The 1 week prize freeze will raise the risk of Esso as it stands to lose market share for that week. Conversely, if Esso were to lower the petrol price, the other 3 may not follow suit for a week. Esso will then gain the market share.

This measure deliberately creates discord amongst the players and spurs competition, helping consumers to achieve lower price in the process.

Roy Ngerng vs Lee Hsien Loong - Shanmugam's reasoning

People can criticize the government in Singapore but if any allegations are made, they must be backed up with facts, said Law and Foreign Affairs Minister K Shanmugam. If that is the case please provide us the facts. Open up the books so that we may examine the relationships between CPF, SLA, HDB, Singapore Government accounts, GIC and Temasek Holdings. Once the facts are made known and are verifiable, no one, lest of all the Prime Minister, should have to suffer any form of baseless allegations that something improper is going on. At heart there are 2 issues: Protecting a person’s reputation against false accusations and the right to information on Government’s finances and its internal workings in order to verify that things are indeed sound. If things are being intentionally kept secret, it is only natural that there will be speculations as to the motives of keeping the things secret and speculations that there may be wrongdoings. The Prime Minister ought to know that this is the price to pay for having secrets. By choosing to bring legal actions against blogger Roy, the mistrust many Singaporeans have of the Government will only deepen.