People's own different levels of personal greed will NEVER allow collusion among all of the passengers on the plane to allow the amount to get that high.  On Dr Dao's flight only 4 people out of a hundred plus passengers had to give up their seat and the bidding would have been over by $2,000 worth of incentives.  Not including flights to Hawaii, that amount could cover 3, maybe 4 lower cost round trips within the continental US.   The closest analogy of any such alleged collusion you descibe might be the DOE student busing contracts where the different bus companies would bid only on certain busing routes so that there was only one bid for each route and that bid was obscenely overpriced which the DOE accepted.  Pretty sure they don't make it that obvious and would think the 'competing' bus companies agree beforehand which route they will take and all the oher companies make sure their bids are all higher than the company that is supposed to take that route.