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Price Gouging

This story about RealPage made for sad and concerning reading. I am hearing J complain about apartment rents and hear similar stories from a couple of other young people I know. These are all single working professionals, still very early career. They can afford to pay for their necessities but above and beyond that is not easy. If the rent is reasonable, they can afford to have a certain quality of life but when it gets to a breaking point then nothing works. 

It becomes about long commutes to get cheaper accommodation, feeling wiped out just getting through the day, not having enough left in time, energy or resources to do things that are fun or rewarding. This is a sad example of data sharing leading to some terrible outcomes for the customer:

To win cases, antitrust prosecutors have traditionally needed to show that competitors agreed among themselves to tamper with pricing. “If competitors agreed among themselves to use the same algorithm and to share information among themselves with the purpose of stabilizing pricing, that would be per se illegal,” said Stucke, the former antitrust prosecutor.

If they simply shared information without agreeing to manipulate pricing, the question of whether antitrust law was violated would be more complex, he said. Stucke said he knew of no cases where companies had been prosecuted for what’s known as tacit collusion while using the same algorithm to set prices.

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