Pricing algorithms can learn to collude with each other to raise prices

If you shop on Amazon, an algorithm rather than a human probably set the price of the service or item you bought. Pricing algorithms have become ubiquitous in online retail as automated systems have grown increasingly affordable and easy to implement. But while companies like airlines and hotels have long used machines to set their prices, pricing systems have evolved. They have moved from rule-based programs to reinforcement-learning ones, where the logic of deciding a product's price is no longer within a human's control. If you recall, reinforcement learning is a subset of machine learning that uses penalties and rewards to incentivize an AI agent toward a specific goal.