Peter Thiel famously once said that competition is for losers. As it turns out, big business agrees. Increased market competition should lead to decreased prices for consumers, but for CEOs interested in increasing profits and shareholder value at the expense of the public, competing on price in an open market is a race to the bottom. Why not instead work together to grow industry’s profits?

Technically, corporate collusion is against the law, and so companies can’t literally coordinate with each other to fix prices. Enter third party middlemen like RealPage for real estate or Agri Stats for the meat industry, which aggregate vast amounts of sensitive consumer market data and use AI and machine learning algorithms to set prices on behalf of their clients.

For our June print issue, Luke Goldstein wrote about how corporations are increasingly using algorithmic pricing to rig the market against customers and fix prices, and what federal regulators can do about it. You can read the full story here.

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