What is "cartel"

Cartel \Car*tel"\, n. [F., fr. LL. cartellus a little paper, dim. fr. L. charta. See 1st Card.]

1. (Mil.) An agreement between belligerents for the exchange of prisoners.
   --Wilhelm.

2. A letter of defiance or challenge; a challenge to single combat. [Obs.]

   He is cowed at the very idea of a cartel.,
   --Sir W. Scott.

   Cartel, or Cartel ship, a ship employed in the exchange of prisoners, or in carrying propositions to an enemy; a ship beating a flag of truce and privileged from capture.

Cartel \Car"tel\, v. t. To defy or challenge. [Obs.]

You shall cartel him.
--B. Jonson.

1550s, "a written challenge," from Middle French cartel (16c.), from Italian cartello "placard," diminutive of carta "card" (see card (n.1)). It came to mean "written agreement between challengers" (1690s) and then "a written agreement between challengers" (1889). Sense of "a commercial trust, an association of industrialists" comes 1902, via German Kartell, which is from French. The older U.S. term for that is trust (n.). The usual German name for them was Interessengemeinschaft, abbreviated IG.

n. 1 A group of businesses or nations that collude to limit competition within an industry or market. 2 A combination of political groups (notably parties) for common action. 3 A written letter of defiance or challenge. 4 An official agreement concerning the exchange of prisoners. 5 (context nautical English) A ship used to negotiate with an enemy in time of war, and to exchange prisoners.

n. a consortium of independent organizations formed to limit competition by controlling the production and distribution of a product or service; "they set up the trust in the hope of gaining a monopoly" [syn: trust, corporate trust, combine]

Cartel is a 1995 Turkish hip hop group that received attention and popularity in both Turkey and Germany. They were famous for pioneering the use of traditional Turkish music instruments in hip hop music. Cartel was the first Turkish-language project to get off the ground and often credited as the group that ignited " Oriental hip hop".

Cartel is an American pop punk band from Conyers, Georgia, United States, that formed in 2003. The group was featured on the MTV television series Band in a Bubble in 2007 as part of an experiment where they were given 20 days to write and record a full album. The current members of the band include vocalist/bassist Will Pugh, lead guitarist Joseph Pepper, guitarist Nic Hudson, and drummer Kevin Sanders.

Cartel is the second studio album American rock band Cartel. It released in stores on August 21, 2007 despite being announced by the band's lead singer as coming out on July 24, 2007. It was officially completed at sometime around 8:00 p.m. on June 10, 2007 and features " Lose It" as the first single.

A cartel usually refers to a tight organization based on a formal agreement among commercial enterprises with conflicting interests. The term may also refer to:

In economics, a cartel is an agreement between competing firms to control prices or exclude entry of a new competitor in a market. It is a formal organization of sellers or buyers that agree to fix selling prices, purchase prices, or reduce production using a variety of tactics. Cartels usually arise in an oligopolistic industry, where the number of sellers is small or sales are highly concentrated and the products being traded are usually commodities. Cartel members may agree on such matters as setting minimum or target prices ( price fixing), reducing total industry output, fixing market shares, allocating customers, allocating territories, bid rigging, establishment of common sales agencies, altering the conditions of sale, or combination of these. The aim of such collusion (also called the cartel agreement) is to increase individual members' profits by reducing competition. If the cartelists do not agree on market shares, they must have a plan to share the extra monopoly profits generated by the cartel.

One can distinguish private cartels from public cartels. In the public cartel a government is involved to enforce the cartel agreement, and the government's sovereignty shields such cartels from legal actions. Inversely, private cartels are subject to legal liability under the antitrust laws now found in nearly every nation of the world. Furthermore, the purpose of private cartels is to benefit only those individuals who constitute it, public cartels, in theory, work to pass on benefits to the populace as a whole.

Competition laws often forbid private cartels. Identifying and breaking up cartels is an important part of the competition policy in most countries, although proving the existence of a cartel is rarely easy, as firms are usually not so careless as to put collusion agreements on paper. Several economic studies and legal decisions of antitrust authorities have found that the median price increase achieved by cartels in the last 200 years is around 25%. Private international cartels (those with participants from two or more nations) had an average price increase of 28%, whereas domestic cartels averaged 18%. Fewer than 10% of all cartels in the sample failed to raise market prices.

Cartel is a German hip hop album released in 1995 featuring various artists of Turkish descent. The compilation contains five tracks by Nuremberg artist Karakan, three songs from the Kiel group Da Crime Posse, three songs by Erci E. from West Berlin and a communal recording by all of the artists entitled Cartel.

Spyce Records facilitated the recording of this album under the supervision of their manager Ozan Sinan. Cartel was initially released by Mercury/Polygram, and by RAKS/Polygram in Turkey. The Turkish market consumed over 300,000 copies, providing for widespread notoriety for each of the contributing artists. The German-Turkish community also received the album enthusiastically, although only 20,000 copies were sold within Germany.

The album cover is a blatant allusion to the Turkish flag in that the "c" is manifested by the crescent of Islam. Album manager Oznan Sinan justifies this symbolism by stating that "Our targer-group are the Turks not the German society". Similarly, the beats were enriched with samples from Turkish folk music and attempted to unify an ethnic minority within Germany.

Cartel ships, in international law in the 18th and the 19th centuries, were ships employed on humanitarian voyages, in particular, to carry prisoners for exchange between places agreed upon in the terms of the exchange. While serving as a cartel, a ship was not subject to capture. However, if it engaged in commerce or warlike acts such as carrying official dispatches or messengers, it lost its character of inviolability and would then be subject to capture. The cartel protection extended to the return voyage. Furthermore, the prisoners being taken for exchange were under an obligation not to engage in hostilities towards their captors. If they were to capture the cartel ship, they would have no rights to salvage, and the owner of the vessel, if it were a ship from their country, would have no right to reclaim the vessel.

During the War of 1812 the British Admiralty wrote to the United States Government that Great Britain would not accept as valid, cartel agreements made on the high seas. On 10 June 1813, USS President captured the outward-bound Falmouth packet Duke of Montrose, Captain Aaron Groub Blewett, which managed to throw her mails overboard before President could send a prize crew aboard. President made a cartel of Duke of Montrose, putting all of Presidents prisoners from three earlier captures, on board and then sending her and her now 79 passengers and crew into Falmouth under the command of an American officer. There the British government refused to recognize the cartel agreement that Blewett, his crew, and passengers had signed. Rather than turn Duke of Montrose over to the Agent for American Prisoners, the British government instructed Blewett to resume command of his ship and prepare her to sail again.