At Bloomberg Law, Giovanna Massarotto, Research Fellow at the Center for Technology, Innovation & Technology (CTIC) examines Department of Justice antitrust pricing suits and argues that algorithmic agreement doesn’t necessarily equal collusion.
Massarotto’s scholarship focuses on how technology affects society and the intersection of law, economics, and computer science.
She is an active scholar and author of Antitrust Settlements: How a Sample Agreement Can Drive the Economy, published by Wolters Kluwer, and of papers in many prestigious journals, including the Journal of Competition Law & Economics and John Marshall Review of Intellectual Property Law.
At Bloomberg Law:
The use of artificial intelligence has been under the microscope, from its role in misinformation campaigns to its potential to violate antitrust law. Companies are increasingly using algorithms to determine their prices at scale, which can cause consumers to pay higher prices for goods.
The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice earlier this year filed a statement of interest in a hotel algorithmic price-fixing case, explaining that “hotels cannot collude on room pricing and cannot use an algorithm to engage in practices that would be illegal if done by a real person.” Most recently, the DOJ filed suit against real estate software company RealPage Inc., accusing it of creating an unlawful pricing scheme to charge tenants higher rent prices.
Though I agree we must fight algorithmic collusion with antitrust lawsuits, I believe there are some myths to dispel where AI is spotlighted as the enabler.
The real issue with AI algorithms isn’t really about algorithmic collusion—it’s about being able to interpret the results of AI to understand whether it’s harming consumers or simply being used to set prices in the digital economy more efficiently. AI is a tool, akin to a calculator or an Excel program, that’s based on statistics—it uses large amounts of data to make predictions through probabilistic models.
Original source can be found here.