Yeah, the most obvious recent example of this is RealPage’s YieldStar product. It advised property managers on what they should set their rental rates to, and allegedly established a cartel in which RealPage’s customers coordinated in pricing their units.

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...

I’m not sure the use of a common algorithm was the most damming part of that. They also pooled otherwise proprietary information and penalized landlords who failed to follow the “recommendations”

You could imagine the exact same scheme without the use of a computer.

I was always skeptical of the algorithmic cartel argument in that case. Turns out it was just a regular cartel all along.