The challenges of third-party pricing algorithms for competition law
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Joseph E. Harrington
Abstract
The advent of competitors using a pricing algorithm supplied by the same software or data analytics company has created challenges for competition law. To begin, a third party may have an incentive to facilitate an agreement with subscribing firms to charge supracompetitive prices. A third party may even have an incentive to recommend supracompetitive prices without the support or knowledge of firms. Finally, and contrary to a canonical price-fixing agreement, a third party offers efficiencies when its pricing algorithm is capable of identifying prices more attuned to market conditions. These challenges are examined in the context of existing competition law—which is found to be inadequate—and some recently proposed remedies, which are found not to properly account for their impact on procompetitive efficiencies and may not even be effective in preventing anticompetitive harm.
© 2025 by Theoretical Inquiries in Law
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- AI, Competition & Markets
- Introduction
- Brave new world? Human welfare and paternalistic AI
- Regulatory insights from governmental uses of AI
- Data is infrastructure
- Synthetic futures and competition law
- The challenges of third-party pricing algorithms for competition law
- Antitrust & AI supply chains
- A general framework for analyzing the effects of algorithms on optimal competition laws
- Paywalling humans
- AI regulation: Competition, arbitrage and regulatory capture
- Tying in the age of algorithms
- User-based algorithmic auditing
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- AI, Competition & Markets
- Introduction
- Brave new world? Human welfare and paternalistic AI
- Regulatory insights from governmental uses of AI
- Data is infrastructure
- Synthetic futures and competition law
- The challenges of third-party pricing algorithms for competition law
- Antitrust & AI supply chains
- A general framework for analyzing the effects of algorithms on optimal competition laws
- Paywalling humans
- AI regulation: Competition, arbitrage and regulatory capture
- Tying in the age of algorithms
- User-based algorithmic auditing
