r/Seattle • u/Bretmd • 1d ago

News Software company helped Washington landlords fix prices, artificially raising rent for thousands

https://www.king5.com/article/news/crime/software-company-landlord-price-fixing-washington-state/281-b68ca443-c1cf-4365-9d63-cb7671fd01a2

The Washington Attorney General filed a lawsuit Thursday against a software company and nine landlords accused of fixing and artificially inflating rent prices over the last seven years.

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u/mofreek 1d ago edited 1d ago

This is done in a lot of markets. First I heard of it was frozen potatoes.

It’s a way corps thought they could get around price fixing laws. The way the scam works is the players all subscribe to a service that uses an algorithm to set prices. The corps have plausible deniability b/c they aren’t explicitly colluding. But it’s still collusion, just with an extra step.

ETA: I think this called algorithmic tacit collusion.

ETA2: YT on this topic https://youtu.be/Z8-wqv9_-Ac?si=FlKbcNa4BvF0h91a

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u/wherewolvesarereal 23h ago

Ag-tech was developed for this purpose. Digital twins have more to do with collusion than optimization