YieldStar was technically an “AI” product, but I don’t really think the computational abilities were what enabled the collusion. RealPage’s employees (according to the DoJ[0]) would actively monitor whether companies were following their pricing recommendations and call up companies that defected. And the software itself used dark patterns to make it easier to simply follow the YieldStar pricing suggestions, rather than set a lower rental rate and be more competitive. The algorithmic pricing I think did allow people to launder their own judgement and simple “trust the process” in a way that in the past would have required knowing complicity with the cartel, but I don’t think it required substantial compute capacity.
(This isn’t a comment on the paper by the way, which I glanced at but did not have the background knowledge to fully comprehend)
[0] See the section labeled “RealPage Uses Multiple Mechanisms To Increase Compliance With Price Recommendations” https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/01/21/2026-01...
You could imagine the exact same scheme without the use of a computer.
“Markets are competitive if and only if P ≠ NP”
It’s 2026, people, you don't have to use crude ASCII approximations of mathematical symbols any more.
For whatever reason, the OS documentation lacks a list of allowed compose key sequences. But they are intuitive enough that you can find many of them through experimentation. For example:
Musical sharp ("♯"): compose + "#" + "#".
Interrobang ("‽"): compose + "!" + "?".
Letter "ñ" as in "jalapeño": compose + "n" + "~".
Copyright ("ⓒ"): compose + "(" + c + ")".
I'm eagerly awaiting the day someone proves that P != NP and HN edits the title of the announcement post in this exact same way.
> If P != NP, the collusion detection problem is computationally infeasible for markets satisfying a natural instance-hardness condition on their demand structure, rendering punishment threats non-credible and collusion unstable.
...and then from the paper:
> Stigler (1964) famously argued that the “chief difficulty” of collusion is detecting “secret price-cutting.”
The thing is that Stigler's insight is far from proven, and indeed, the primary difficulty in collusion is often not the detection of defection. Firms know they're being undercut all the time. The problem is that very often, there is nothing they can do about it. Markets are specifically structured as firm-to-firm transactions, where competing firms have no leverage over what your firm can do or what sort of transactions you can conduct, and as long as this condition holds it doesn't matter if you know that a competitor is fucking you over, you can't do anything about it.
I'd argue that the increase in collusion and anticompetitive behavior lately is because these conditions increasingly don't hold. When you intersperse another party in the transaction, eg. a regulatory agency, permitting body, or exclusive distribution deal, you introduce a leverage point for incumbents to punish competitors who choose to undercut them.
Examples of the former: cutting prices yourself; increasing product quality; differentiating yourself; spending more on advertising to get the word out about your product.
Examples of the latter: crafting exclusive deals with your distributors to prevent your competitors from getting shelf space; politically influencing regulatory bodies to declare your competitors' existence illegal; making direct agreements with the leadership of opposing firms to not drop prices or hike wages; assassinating, extorting, or kidnapping rival business leaders.
Basically it comes down to "control yourself, because you cannot control others". In a functioning market, you have no control over what rival firms offer. Your only legal reaction to competition is to improve your own offering until it is the best it can be. In pathological markets where the assumption is (as in the paper) that you can punish rivals for not colluding, you actively make your competitor's offering worse.
Those pathological markets exist today, but if you're analyzing markets economically, your root assumption should not be that pathology is normal and only the lack of information keeps it in check, it should be that information is abundant and it is the lack of ability that keeps it in check.
A more capable actor can anticipate the actions of other participants to a greater degree. Imagine that all sellers are such actors. Consider that collusion happens (and is bad) because it enables sellers to extract much higher prices than the market would otherwise set. When all sellers are such "hyper rational" actors they can act cooperatively to maximize their profits without the need to explicitly coordinate in secret. The same end result without the illegal step sure feels like an end run around the spirit of the law.
> Edit: Isn't another implication of this, that increased compute -> collusion imply that increased compute -> communism becomes feasible?
That depends on what you think the problem that communism faced was. AI increases our ability to centrally plan but it probably doesn't do much in and of itself to combat various forms of corruption. Human greed is an invariant; by glorifying and directly making use of it capitalism is hardened against a number of otherwise pathological behaviors.