Collusion
Categories: Ethics/Morals, Regulations
The act of secretly working together to subvert either a regulatory authority or the competitive process. These deals are often illegal, though sometimes they are more shady than they are outright violations.
Examples can include things like corporations conspiring to fix prices for a certain product. There was a famous case of firms fixing the price of the chemical lysine in the 1990s. It eventually provided the story for the Matt Damon movie The Informant. There's also the highly publicized collusion among Major League Baseball owners in the 1980s to keep free agent salaries down.
However, collusion can exist in more mundane situations as well, such as two players at a friendly poker game signaling each other with respect to the strength of their hands, so that together they have an advantage over the rest of the table. See yet another Matt Damon movie: Rounders.