The Phoebus cartel was a cartel set up in 1924 that existed to control the manufacture and sale of light bulbs.
The Phoebus cartel certainly seems to have stopped competition in the light bulb industry for some years, and has been accused of preventing technological advances that would have produced longer-lasting light bulbs.
However, the Phoebus cartel also features in a fictionalized form as a central plot element in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, which has led some to blur fact and fiction.
Patrick Gaughen. Structural Inefficiency in the Early Twentieth Century: Studies in the Aluminum and Incadescent Lamp Markets (http://www.andover.edu/aep/papers/610/pgaughen98.pdf) (Adobe .pdf format)
Cartels are prohibited by antitrust laws in most countries; however, they continue to exist nationally and internationally, formally and informally.
In general, cartels are economically unstable in that there is a great incentive for members to cheat and to sell more than the quotas set by the cartel (see also game theory).
Empirical studies of 20th century cartels have determined that the mean duration of discovered cartels is from 5 to 8 years.
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