Interlocking directorate

In the United States, antitrust law prohibits interlocking directorates within the same industry over collusion concerns, though legal observers have noted that this has long been unenforced.

[5] They help corporate executives maintain an advantage, and gain more power over workers and consumers, by reducing intra-class competition and increasing cooperation.

[2][6] In the words of Scott R. Bowman, interlocks "facilitate a community of interest among the elite of the corporate world that supplants the competitive and socially divisive ethos of an earlier stage of capitalism with an ethic of cooperation and a sense of shared values and goals.

[8] Interlocks have benefits over trusts, cartels, and other monopolistic/oligopolistic forms of organization, due to their greater fluidity, and lower visibility (making them less open to public scrutiny).

[21][22] It has also been shown that inbound interlocks (i.e. a network link from external firms into a focal firm) have a much greater impact and importance than outbound interlocks, a finding that laid the foundation for further research on inter-organizational networks based on overlapping memberships and other linkages such as joint ventures and patent backward and forward citations.

[3] In October 2022, it was reported that antitrust scrutiny brought on by Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter led to the resignation of seven directors from the boards of five companies.

[4] According to Bloomberg News, private equity firms including Blackstone Inc. and Apollo Global Management are currently under federal interlocking directorate scrutiny.

Levin and Roy tested the graph for cut points and failed to find any with their search starting with corporations with large boards.

The directors and corporations are listed arbitrarily to begin and the elastic bands placed as edges of the bipartite graph.