Exercise 2: Why 96% Quota Violation Complicates, Rather Than Disproves, OPEC's Power — Possible Solution
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If Colgan's finding proved OPEC had no real market power at all, you'd
expect the organization's own production quotas to be essentially
meaningless noise - numbers no one paid attention to either way,
with real market outcomes completely unrelated to whatever OPEC
formally agreed to. But that's not actually the picture the chapter's
own other real facts support.

OPEC still genuinely controls a real, substantial share of global
production and reserves (79.5% of proven reserves as of 2022) - a
share large enough that its members' collective decisions plausibly
still influence global oil markets in real, meaningful ways, even if
imperfectly. The 96% violation figure doesn't erase that underlying
market share; it shows something more specific and more interesting:
that even with substantial genuine market power, actually coordinating
that power smoothly and reliably among multiple independent countries,
each with its own separate economic interests, is much harder in
practice than a simple cartel model assumes.

This is a real complication, not a refutation, because it changes WHAT
KIND of story is actually true - not "OPEC has no power," but "OPEC
has real power that is harder to exercise in disciplined, coordinated
fashion than the textbook cartel model suggests," since individual
members have their own real incentive to quietly cheat on agreed
quotas even while the group's overall market share remains
substantial. Real market power and real difficulty coordinating that
power to a specific, agreed outcome can both be true at the same time.

ANSWER: The 96% violation figure doesn't disprove OPEC's real market
power (a substantial, documented 79.5% share of proven reserves) - it
complicates the simple cartel story by showing that having real market
power and successfully coordinating that power through disciplined,
reliable agreement among independent countries are two different
things, with the second turning out to be much harder in practice than
the textbook oligopoly model assumes.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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This distinguishes "having market power" from "successfully
coordinating that power," explaining why both the real market-share
figures and the real violation figure can be simultaneously true.