Here’s the scenario: Imagine you run a lodging business and the news just dropped. Taylor Swift is coming to town! A surge of Swifties are impending. Your competitors are already upping their nightly rates. You’ve got roughly half an hour to decide what average daily rate ought to be for your soon-to-be-sold-out room inventory. Your average revenue management platform can make an algorithmic guess on what you ought to charge, based upon historical data plus whatever information other users on the platform chose to disclose. Is it a crime to click that tab?
Article - Could Using Algorithms to Set Hotel Rates Become Illegal? - By Adam Harris - Is it illegal to estimate what hotel prices might be in the future? According to some powerful people, it could be. Plaintiffs in several class-action lawsuits argue that merely having access to algorithmically informed price insights amounts to an illegal conspiracy among business competitors - that it?s fair to assume they ll stop competing and just fix prices instead.