The FTC Has Algorithmic Price-Fixing In Its Antitrust Crosshairs

Are you delegating your pricing decisions to a common algorithm software platform? If so, you might violate the antitrust laws. It may not even matter whether you actually communicated with your competitors. All it might take is for the antitrust agencies—The Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission—to allege illegal collusion is the use by your company of an algorithm-software tool trained using competitively sensitive data, with knowledge that some of your competitors are doing the same thing. Even deviation from the algorithm's recommended pricing might not save you from antitrust liability.

The FTC's Blog Post: Price Fixing by Algorithm is Still Price Fixing

On March 1, 2024, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a blog post explaining how relying on a common algorithm to determine your pricing decisions might violate Section 1 of the Sherman Act.