The recent rush to settle by both poultry and pork companies suggest these claims were credible. In addition to Tyson, Pilgrim’s Pride reached a $75 million settlement and several smaller chicken companies will pay a collective $13 million to settle their charges. In December, the owner of Pilgrim’s Pride, JBS, also reached a $24.5 million settlement with pork buyers and agreed to cooperate with ongoing litigation against co-conspirators, such as Hormel.

Notably, these settlements come after Pilgrim’s Pride pled guilty in October to similar, but far more specific, bid-rigging charges brought by the Justice Department. As a part of their antitrust probe, the DOJ indicted 10 poultry executives who still face charges.

Chicken companies maintain that this federal probe and the private suits are unrelated and continue to deny broader price-fixing allegations, even in settling. Tyson told the Wall Street Journal that “the settlements were in the best interests of the company and its shareholders in order to avoid the uncertainty, risk, expense and distraction of protracted litigation.” Tyson and others claim higher grain costs and new demand drove up chicken prices, not collusion.

However, Carstensen doubts that Tyson and others would pay such large settlements without some guilt. “When you tell me you are paying $200 million to avoid trial, but you were going to win at trial, there is a down home farm expression—bullshit—that comes to mind,” he says. “No, you realize[d] that there was a very substantial probability that you would lose.”

While $221 million may seem like a steep penalty, it likely dwarfs what the corporation made in illicit profits. One study by antitrust scholars found that in approximately 80 percent of private price-fixing settlements the plaintiffs did not take back the full value of overcharges.

By these odds, the risk of a fine alone may not outweigh the benefits of price-fixing for corporations, especially since scholars believe most cartels are never even discovered. To that end, Carstensen would like to see more behavioral remedies or conditions, that force corporations to change their business practices—such as reasonable restrictions on information sharing through third-parties like AgriStats. Carstensen and other scholars also believe criminal charges for executives are a much stronger deterrent for corporate decision-makers.

Carstensen also notes that decades of lax merger enforcement simply makes collusion easier. “More markets are sufficiently concentrated [with] few enough competitors that collusion of one kind or another becomes much more feasible,” he says. “There’s a professor at the Wharton school who has been saying, ‘look if companies can’t avoid price fixing, why not just break ‘em up, make the market more workably competitive?’ That’s an extreme possibility, but very unlikely.”