Title: What Do We Now Know about ‘Machine Collusion’
Abstract: The possibility and prevalence of machine-based price collusion are hotly debated. The pessimistic view is that the use of self-leaning pricing algorithms poses a significant threat to competition, which warrants urgent attention. To others, this is an exaggerated hypothesis with no evidence or real-world examples, and which in any case can be handled with the tools already available to competition regulators. This note addresses three central questions by reviewing the case for and evidence on algorithmic price collusion: (i) Is machine-based collusion possible? (ii) Is it likely to be widespread? and (iii) Can the current law cope? The debate over algorithmic collusion was kick started by legal academics Ezrachi and Stuck,1 Mehra,2 and Gal.3 Their thesis is that the use of pricing algorithms is widespread, they can be used to facilitate and expand collusive pricing and enable a new breed of autonomous machine-generated tacit...
Publication Year: 2021
Publication Date: 2021-11-27
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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