A novel debate within competition policy and regulation circles is whether autonomous machine learning algorithms may learn to collude on prices. We show that when fims face short-run price commitments, independent Q-learning (a simple but well-established self-learning algorithm) learns to...

Prices are increasingly set by algorithms. One concern is that intelligent algorithms may learn to collude on higher prices even in the absence of the kind of coordination necessary to establish an antitrust infringement. However, exactly how this may happen is an open question. I show how in...