In fragmented industries, where there are many small firms and none that have immense power, coordination is difficult. Each firm operates independently, and the absence of a dominant player makes it hard to establish common standards of practices, which leads to an inconsistency in the market. Fragmented industries also have low barrier to entry, therefore having a high entry and lots of competition. Additionally, there's not going to be industry-specific regulations which will result in difficulty in horizontal coordination. This is because you won't be able to coordinate efforts with competitors in order to try to corner markets. Fragmented industries aren't going to be able to gain profitability by colluding with competitors, making it impossible to coordinate