As I’ve alluded to in another comment, I think you’re missing part of the model. If you incorporate UO considerations, you would have two further perspectives to incorporate:
Your model now includes the company’s competitors, who also benefit from collusion
Your model also includes the rest of the economy, which is damaged by the collusion
It is not immediately clear to me which of these would win. To a first-order approximation, it may appear that the two effects are roughly offsetting, since the cartel likely moves money from the rest of the economy to the cartel members in what might simplistically be treated as a zero sum game. To add more detail to the model, it would be worth considering that the cartel essentially constitutes a form of rent-seeking, which is generally considered by economists to be bad for the economy, which suggests that item 2 likely outweighs item 1 (i.e. maybe makes the Universal Owner less keen to take part in a cartel). I won’t keep on adding more and more details to the putative model.
I think the bottom line here is that companies currently have incentives to collude, and those incentives may still survive under a Universal Ownership system.
Your point about the mechanism of that collusion is a good one. Regulations currently anticipate ways to forbid anti-competitive behaviour, and likely don’t already anticipate a UO-driven mechanism, so the regulations would have to evolve. It’s worth bearing in mind that if this concept does reach the companies themselves (not just investors) then it will take many years, and so there will be plenty of time for this regulatory adaptation to occur.
As I’ve alluded to in another comment, I think you’re missing part of the model. If you incorporate UO considerations, you would have two further perspectives to incorporate:
Your model now includes the company’s competitors, who also benefit from collusion
Your model also includes the rest of the economy, which is damaged by the collusion
It is not immediately clear to me which of these would win. To a first-order approximation, it may appear that the two effects are roughly offsetting, since the cartel likely moves money from the rest of the economy to the cartel members in what might simplistically be treated as a zero sum game. To add more detail to the model, it would be worth considering that the cartel essentially constitutes a form of rent-seeking, which is generally considered by economists to be bad for the economy, which suggests that item 2 likely outweighs item 1 (i.e. maybe makes the Universal Owner less keen to take part in a cartel). I won’t keep on adding more and more details to the putative model.
I think the bottom line here is that companies currently have incentives to collude, and those incentives may still survive under a Universal Ownership system.
Your point about the mechanism of that collusion is a good one. Regulations currently anticipate ways to forbid anti-competitive behaviour, and likely don’t already anticipate a UO-driven mechanism, so the regulations would have to evolve. It’s worth bearing in mind that if this concept does reach the companies themselves (not just investors) then it will take many years, and so there will be plenty of time for this regulatory adaptation to occur.