Robots colluding to manipulate markets - Business Insider
This brings to mind Alan Greenspan's Chapter on Antitrust in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal --- which I wish had been assigned reading in Law School.
It boggles the mind that correctly guessing what other market players might do based entirely on publicly available data in the market and then basing one's own actions on that mental model of their possible future behavior, particularly where the modeling is based on generalized mathematical learning techniques, could be considered "collusion" which always entailed private advanced direct communication and coordination. (i.e. a Quid Pro Quo of, "if you charge more than the market will bear for X, I will choose not to compete with you and set my price at the same level".)
In effect, the only way to avoid the risk a finding of criminality under this new twisted logic would be to prohibit the use of machine learning technology in setting prices.
For the underling academic paper see:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?a...
It boggles the mind that correctly guessing what other market players might do based entirely on publicly available data in the market and then basing one's own actions on that mental model of their possible future behavior, particularly where the modeling is based on generalized mathematical learning techniques, could be considered "collusion" which always entailed private advanced direct communication and coordination. (i.e. a Quid Pro Quo of, "if you charge more than the market will bear for X, I will choose not to compete with you and set my price at the same level".)
In effect, the only way to avoid the risk a finding of criminality under this new twisted logic would be to prohibit the use of machine learning technology in setting prices.
For the underling academic paper see:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?a...
It leaves one to wonder what will happen when the machines get together and try to wrap their heads around taxation.