Every ten days, on average, a major company confesses to an antitrust felony. These voluntary confessions are acts of pure self-interest: When company representatives contact the U.S. Department of Justice, they typically provide a list of competitors who participated in the antitrust offense, complete with the names of the offending executives and the dates of their questionable activities. If all goes well, the confessing company and its executives will qualify for blanket amnesty from criminal prosecution while their fingered competitors will get hammered with jail time and criminal fines—penalties that are growing steadily more severe.
A version of this article appeared in the September 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review.