A market situation where competitors offer closely comparable prices and terms. Conscious parallelism may not be automatically illegal, but it is regarded as highly suspicious by competition authorities and many competition and antitrust law systems prohibit or penalize exchanges of information between competitors or business practices that are useful to supporting such parallelism, regarding them as cartel-like practices. The existence of such parallelism is also regarded as a strong indictor or clue to the the existence of a formal cartel and may spur authorities to investigate.