"The Justice Department alleged in a civil antitrust lawsuit filed Aug. 23 that a Texas company called RealPage is orchestrating what amounts to a nationwide apartment cartel by persuading major landlords to use its software to set prices for millions of apartments across the country."
"RealPage markets its software by boasting that it increases rents by 3 percent to 7 percent. The case is important because it highlights the growing use of algorithms to set prices and the potential for companies that are supposed to be competing to instead coordinate at the expense of their customers by using the same price-setting formulas."
"Technology, he said, took something that may have been inherently difficult to do in terms of putting a cartel together and actually is making it much easier and more effective."
"The RealPage complaint, by contrast, is substantially based on the work of a recently created team of Justice Department computer analysts who teased out the workings of the company's algorithms by painstakingly examining them."
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