My take: Let's break with the cartel paradigm syndrome and try something new. Let's try to explain the workings of the oil industry within a competitive framework a la Marx, something different than perfect competition. Since all economists accept that the US oil industry is competitive, let's try to understand the determinants of the price of oil in the US and only then open the analysis to OPEC and the rest of the international industry. OPEC does have an impact on prices but empirically and theoretically more and more analysts are agreeing that its influence is decreasing.
What do you think should be the best way to go about it?
My guess is that there is a Marxian/Ricardian central tendency, a la Bina, but that once oil began trading on the futures markets, its day-to-day (and even year-to-yaer) price fluctuations are now dominated by short-term trading considerations, like any other financial or real commodity. OPEC is an influence, but hardly the last word.
I had my researcher look into the oil pricing literature and was amazed to find that little has been published on the topic in the last 10-15 years (unless she was looking in the wrong places, which I doubt, because she's very good).
Doug
