Collusion with Competitive Marginals: Price-Level Audits Are Blind by Construction
Empirical work on algorithmic collusion asks one question of the data: are prices supracompetitive? We show this can be answered "no" by a conspiracy that is nonetheless profitable. Consider bidding agents that couple only through the joint distribution of their unexplained bid components, leaving every agent's own bid law exactly at the competitive law. Any test whose input is a single agent's price or bid history then has power exactly equal to its false-positive rate, for every coupling strength up to comonotonicity. The published detection methodology is therefore blind to this conduct by construction rather than underpowered, and no sample size repairs it. Three empirical results fol...
| Authors | Xin Xu, Chengrui Wu, Jiayu Lu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.GT |
| Published | 29 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 July 2026 |
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