Are We Entering an AI Price-Fixing Dystopia?

“Algorithmic price-repairing ecombines to be spreading to more and more industries,” cautions the Atlantic. “And existing laws may not be provideped to stop it.”

They begin with RealPage’s rental-property gentleware (pointing out that “a series of litigations says it’s someleang else: an AI-allowd price-repairing consillegal copying” and “The litigations also argue that RealPage prescertains landlords to adhere with its pricing proposeions.”) But the most vital point is that RealPage isn’t the only company doing this:
Its main competitor, Yardi, is included in a aenjoy litigation. One of RealPage’s subsidiaries, a service called Rainproducer, faces multiple legitimate disputes for allegedly facilitating price-repairing in the toastyel industry. (Yardi and Rainproducer refute wrongdoing.) Similar protestts have been bcimpolitet aachievest companies in industries as varied as health insurance, tire manufacturing, and meat processing. But triumphning these cases is proving difficult.
The article remarks that “Agreeing to repair prices is punishable with up to 10 years in prison and a $100 million fine.” But it also remarks worrys that algorithms could produce price-repairing-enjoy behavior that’s “almost impossible to sue under existing anticount on laws. Price-repairing, in other words, has accessed the algorithmic age, but the laws depicted to impede it have not kept up.”

Last week, San Francisco passed a first-of-its-benevolent ordinance prohibitning “both the sale and use of gentleware which combines non-accessible competitor data to set, propose or advise on rents and occupancy levels.”

Whether other jurisdictions chase suit remains to be seen.

In the unbenevolenttime, more and more companies are figuring out ways to use algorithms to set prices. If these reassociate do allow de facto price-repairing, and handle to escape legitimate scruminuscule, the result could be a benevolent of pricing dystopia in which competition to produce better products and lessen prices would be replaced by coordination to hold prices high and profits flotriumphg. That would unbenevolent lastingly higher costs for users — enjoy an inflation nightmare that never ends.