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Rent-setting as you mention came to my mind immediately as well. Planet money has a good piece on a related topic https://www.npr.org/2023/02/06/1154775118/ice-cream-ben-jerr... . This stuff really opened my eyes to the idea that old-school conceptions of things like collusion, and even classic game theoretic ideas of perfect and complete information, all seem to need radical updates for the tightly connected and algorithmic times and economies that we live in. It seems almost unavoidable that all markets are generally going to move towards both complete and perfect information. We see that this is still somewhat asymmetric, because sellers are more organized because they have more capital, and they can generally afford to hold rather than sell whenever they don't like the market. But in the limit, buyers do catch up a bit, because at least they can browse lots of listings for stuff like housing. Meanwhile in the labor market, the (mostly American) taboo against discussing compensation with coworkers is slowly going away, and there's stuff like glassdoor, and laws that require stating some kind of range for compensation, etc. In terms of cards on the table, people generally can't keep secrets, since we need to account for practically every expense over 10k. Corporations might have an easier time in some cases, but large organizations leak, so I doubt whether they can really hide the fact that they are ramping up for a new chip factory or whatever. So getting a fair price for anything seems likely to get harder, and prices for everything go up. I'm not versed enough in the topics to really even articulate a good question here, but particularly with more things being algorithmically determined more of the time, perhaps open information is not as good for markets as we thought. Even the relatively straightforward classical idea of a monopoly is starting to feel dated, because if I can own only 10% of 10 key industries and use that to meltdown the whole economy because of the interconnectedness, then focusing on monopolies has little effect on market stability and consumer choice anyway. Back to the topic of collusion though, maybe the simplest thing is to remove the idea of intent when this stuff is getting litigated. Do we even care that collusion should be some kind of conspiracy with intent? Or do we just dislike the effects and so we want it to never happen? Because in the future human "intent" is going to continue to disappear completely while everyone says "look, the computers decided". There's no cigar-smoking cabal planning stuff in dark rooms anymore because those guys are out golfing. No email chain with a smoking gun, because all that stuff is itself an inefficiency that profit-optimizing algorithms will increasingly be working around. |