Three consumers who stay at casino-hotels in Atlantic City brought a class action against some of those hotels and their algorithmic software provider, alleging a conspiracy to fix prices in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The district court dismissed the case, but today the Third Circuit reversed and reinstated the complaint.
In reaching its conclusion, the court of appeals emphasized it was not finding illegal “industry-wide use of the same algorithmic software, but rather focused on the specific factual allegations that the algorithm was ” in effect collecting non-public commercial information from defendants and utilizing the collective pot of data to ‘suggest’ prices to each” hotel.
