Antitrust Insights
Analysis and practical guides on antitrust.
4 articles, checklists, and guides on antitrust law, written by the attorneys at MC Law. Every piece is general information, not legal advice—for a specific matter, contact the firm.
Pricing Algorithm Toolkit: Vendor Diligence, Data Governance, and Litigation Defense
This toolkit provides the working documents for an algorithmic pricing compliance programme. It opens with a vendor diligence questionnaire designed to elicit the facts a sales team will not volunteer, followed by contract clauses that remove adherence pressure, restrict data contribution, and prohibit competitor disclosure. A data provenance register and an information exchange protocol give the data function something concrete to implement. Operational tools include a reason-code taxonomy for documented human review, a competitor contact report form, document hygiene guidance for anyone writing a business case, and an adherence reporting template. The litigation section supplies a model documentation index, a litigation hold scope, and a first-response sequence for a civil investigative demand. It closes with a board memorandum template and a clean team protocol for transaction diligence.
Auditing a Pricing Algorithm for Antitrust Risk: A Practical Guide
An algorithmic pricing audit is not a technical review; it is an inquiry into what data enters the model, what assurance the firm receives about competitors, and whether pricing decisions remain the firm's own. This guide sets out a twelve-step audit that a legal team can run with the pricing and data functions, beginning with scoping and privilege and moving through vendor diligence, data provenance mapping, model architecture classification, and contract review. It covers the interviews that matter more than the documentation, the document review that finds the sentence nobody should have written, and the analysis of adherence and deviation that will be central to any later dispute. Remediation sections address contract renegotiation, model reconfiguration, decision documentation, and training. It closes with reporting to the board, setting the re-audit cadence, and what to do if the audit finds something serious.
Algorithmic Pricing Compliance Checklist
This checklist covers the compliance controls that keep an algorithmic pricing programme defensible. It begins with the inventory that finds every tool in use, including the departmental subscriptions legal has never seen, and the architecture classification that determines how much scrutiny each requires. Data provenance sections trace every competitor-derived field to its original human or public source and separate lawful market intelligence from inter-firm communication. Pooling safeguards are measured against the recognized conditions for lawful information exchange, followed by the contract terms to find, negotiate, or remove. Later sections cover model configuration, documented human review, document hygiene, training scenarios, and the vendor conduct that becomes the subscriber's problem. It closes with acquisition diligence, board reporting, and the escalation steps if something serious is found.
Algorithmic Pricing and Antitrust: Shared Software, Tacit Collusion, and the New Price-Fixing Cases
Software that recommends prices from a pool of competitor data has become standard in several industries, and it has produced a wave of litigation asking whether a common algorithm can be an agreement. This article separates the questions courts are actually deciding: whether a hub-and-spoke theory works when the spokes never talk to each other, when a per se rule applies rather than a rule of reason, and what the older information-exchange cases contribute. It traces the doctrine from Interstate Circuit and American Tobacco through Twombly and Matsushita, explains why conscious parallelism alone is lawful and what plus factors change that, and identifies the specific design features that convert a useful pricing tool into an antitrust problem. Worked examples follow a hotel operator evaluating a revenue management vendor, a distributor building an internal model, and a company responding to a civil investigative demand. It closes with the compliance architecture that keeps a pricing programme defensible.