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dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2FlxZOb
mostlysignssomeportents:
Literally the only kind of monopolistic behavior that the US government is willing to prosecute is price fixing, and that’s why it’s so important to read Artificial intelligence, algorithmic pricing, and collusion, a paper by four Italian economists from the University of Bologna who document how price-fixing is an emergent property of pricing algorithms – the systems online merchants use to price-match with their competitors.
The researchers find that “even relatively simple pricing algorithms
systematically learn to play sophisticated collusive strategies,”
through iterated turns in which each tries to meet the others’ prices
without losing money, and that it’s seemingly impossible to design
pricing algorithms that don’t evolve collusive strategies (“the
propensity to collude is stubborn – substantial collusion continues to
prevail even when the active firms are three or four in number, when
they are asymmetric, and when they operate in a stochastic
environment”).
Pricing bots usually come to our attention when they made weird decisions that produce hilarious outcomes,
but this paper suggests that the unsexy, invisible workaday world of
algorithmic pricing is ripping off everyone who buys just about
anything, even by the narrow and lax standards of modern antitrust
enforcement.
https://boingboing.net/2019/02/14/skynet-price-gouging.html
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mostlysignssomeportents:
Literally the only kind of monopolistic behavior that the US government is willing to prosecute is price fixing, and that’s why it’s so important to read Artificial intelligence, algorithmic pricing, and collusion, a paper by four Italian economists from the University of Bologna who document how price-fixing is an emergent property of pricing algorithms – the systems online merchants use to price-match with their competitors.
The researchers find that “even relatively simple pricing algorithms
systematically learn to play sophisticated collusive strategies,”
through iterated turns in which each tries to meet the others’ prices
without losing money, and that it’s seemingly impossible to design
pricing algorithms that don’t evolve collusive strategies (“the
propensity to collude is stubborn – substantial collusion continues to
prevail even when the active firms are three or four in number, when
they are asymmetric, and when they operate in a stochastic
environment”).
Pricing bots usually come to our attention when they made weird decisions that produce hilarious outcomes,
but this paper suggests that the unsexy, invisible workaday world of
algorithmic pricing is ripping off everyone who buys just about
anything, even by the narrow and lax standards of modern antitrust
enforcement.
https://boingboing.net/2019/02/14/skynet-price-gouging.html
(Your picture was not posted)
