Related papers: Algorithmic collusion: A critical review
Collusion in market pricing is a concept associated with human actions to raise market prices through artificially limited supply. Recently, the idea of algorithmic collusion was put forward, where the human action in the pricing process is…
The rise of algorithmic pricing in online retail platforms has attracted significant interest in how autonomous software agents interact under competition. This article explores the potential emergence of algorithmic collusion -…
This paper examines whether widely used online learning algorithms in pricing can independently reach competitive outcomes or instead foster tacit collusion. This issue has drawn considerable attention from competition regulators as…
Nowadays, a significant share of the Business-to-Consumer sector is based on online platforms like Amazon and Alibaba and uses Artificial Intelligence for pricing strategies. This has sparked debate on whether pricing algorithms may tacitly…
We propose a fresh `meta-game' perspective on the problem of algorithmic collusion in pricing games a la Bertrand. Economists have interpreted the fact that algorithms can learn to price collusively as tacit collusion. We argue instead that…
Pricing algorithms have demonstrated the capability to learn tacit collusion that is largely unaddressed by current regulations. Their increasing use in markets, including oligopolistic industries with a history of collusion, calls for…
Algorithmic pricing raises a question of interpretation as well as intervention: when autonomous deep-learning pricing systems sustain supracompetitive prices, what strategic pattern have they learned, and how might market institutions…
Artificial intelligence algorithms are increasingly used by firms to set prices. Previous research shows that they can exhibit collusive behaviour, but how quickly they can do so has so far remained an open question. I show that a modern…
Firms' algorithm development practices are often homogeneous. Whether firms train algorithms on similar data, aim at similar benchmarks, or rely on similar pre-trained models, the result is correlated predictions. We model the impact of…
The rise of autonomous pricing systems has sparked growing concern over algorithmic collusion in markets from retail to housing. This paper examines controlled information quality as an ex ante policy lever: by reducing the fidelity of data…
Algorithmic price collusion facilitated by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms raises significant concerns. We examine how AI agents using Q-learning engage in tacit collusion in two-sided markets. Our experiments reveal that AI-driven…
The threat of algorithmic collusion, and whether it merits regulatory intervention, remains debated, as existing evaluations of its emergence often rely on long learning horizons, assumptions about counterparty rationality in adopting…
Consider sellers in a competitive market that use algorithms to adapt their prices from data that they collect. In such a context it is plausible that algorithms could arrive at prices that are higher than the competitive prices and this…
In the rapidly evolving landscape of eCommerce, Artificial Intelligence (AI) based pricing algorithms, particularly those utilizing Reinforcement Learning (RL), are becoming increasingly prevalent. This rise has led to an inextricable…
Algorithmic pricing is increasingly shaping market competition, raising concerns about its potential to compromise competitive dynamics. While prior work has shown that reinforcement learning (RL)-based pricing algorithms can lead to tacit…
Algorithmic collusion is an emerging concept in current artificial intelligence age. Whether algorithmic collusion is a creditable threat remains as an argument. In this paper, we propose an algorithm which can extort its human rival to…
This paper develops a formal framework to assess policies of learning algorithms in economic games. We investigate whether reinforcement-learning agents with collusive pricing policies can successfully extrapolate collusive behavior from…
Algorithmic pricing on online e-commerce platforms raises the concern of tacit collusion, where reinforcement learning algorithms learn to set collusive prices in a decentralized manner and through nothing more than profit feedback. This…
Recent work shows that pricing with symmetric LLM agents leads to algorithmic collusion. We show that collusion is fragile under the heterogeneity typical of real deployments. In a stylized repeated-pricing model, heterogeneity in patience…
We develop a tractable model for studying strategic interactions between learning algorithms. We uncover a mechanism responsible for the emergence of algorithmic collusion. We observe that algorithms periodically coordinate on actions that…