Algorithmic Collusion: A Real Problem for Competition Policy?

By Emilio Calvano, Giacomo Calzolari, Vincenzo Denicolò & Sergio Pastorello

Recently, antitrust authorities started to worry about the possible consequences of algorithmic pricing. Indeed, we document that pricing algorithms are already widely used and argue that they are likely to become even more prevalent in the future. In particular, authorities worry about data-driven price discrimination and algorithmic collusion. We focus on the latter. It is the contention of this article that algor