The hotel-casino rulings by Williams and Chief Judge Miranda Du of the US District Court for the District of Nevada add “contours” to evolving case law on algorithmic price-fixing, like whether algorithms can be used to reach an agreement among competitors, said Diana L. Moss, vice president and director of competition policy for the Progressive Policy Institute.
“The courts in the United States are pretty good at taking traditional principles and applying them to new settings, and the new setting of course is the digital setting,” Moss said. “At the end of this, we are going to have a body of case law, where a lot of these questions are going to be answered around whether algorithms can in fact serve as a method of communication to fix prices.”
But the judges in both the Las Vegas and Atlantic City cases applied the same rationale in their dismissals, saying the hotel-casinos weren’t required to accept pricing recommendations from the Rainmaker software and were free to make their own independent decisions.
“The courts are struggling with this issue—if members of the agreement were able to deviate, what does that mean for the allegations of a conspiracy?” Moss said.
