The ice cream conspiracy

Take a look in any supermarket ice cream freezer section and you may see a mystery. There are big containers of the typical ice cream brands: Breyers, Turkey Hill, and Edy's. And there are specialty brands that make gelato, low-fat and vegan ice creams. And then there are the fancy pints: which is mostly Ben & Jerry's and Häagen-Dazs.<br/><br/>Häagen-Dazs has flavors like vanilla, chocolate, pistachio—the sort of flavors that run smooth. And then Ben & Jerry's specializes in chunky flavors: Cherry Garcia, The Tonight Dough, Chunky Monkey, etc. The two hardly ever cross into the other's turf. Why?<br/><br/>It's possible they are experiencing something common to natural competition—they are specializing in what works best for them. But, as Christopher Sullivan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison suspects, the two companies may be engaging in what is known as "tacit collusion," where two parties silently agree to... stick to their own territory.<br/><br/>We try to get to the creamy core of what makes up a conspiracy, and how the consumer eventually loses out in this cold, cold war.<br/><br/><em>Today's episode was produced by Willa Rubin and Alyssa Jeong Perry. It was engineered by Josh Newell and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. It was edited by Jess Jiang.<br/><br/>Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in </em><a href="http://n.pr/PM-digital"><em>Apple Podcasts</em></a><em> or at </em><a href="https://n.pr/3HlREPz"><em>plus.npr.org/planetmoney</em></a><em>.</em>