A lot of things are only true if P != NP but says nothing about P being within epsilon of NP.
Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
31–40 of 176 posts
Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#32The actual paper's title is "Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP" Seems that HN's auto-headline rewriting in this case has made a critical error :) >Artificial intelligence, by expanding firms' computational capabilities, is pushing markets from the competitive regime toward the collusive regime, explaining the empirical emergence of algorithmic collusion without explicit coordination. I have to dig more i…
Yeah, the most obvious recent example of this is RealPage’s YieldStar product. It advised property managers on what they should set their rental rates to, and allegedly established a cartel in which RealPage’s customers coordinated in pricing their units.
YieldStar was technically an “AI” product, but I don’t really think the computational abilities were what enabled the collusion. RealPage’s employees (according to the DoJ[0]) would actively monitor whether companies were following their pricing recommendations and call up companies that defected. And the software itself used dark patterns to make it easier to simply follow the YieldStar pricing suggestions, rather than set a lower rental rate and be more competitive. The algorithmic pricing I think did allow people to launder their own judgement and simple “trust the process” in a way that in the past would have required knowing complicity with the cartel, but I don’t think it required substantial compute capacity.
(This isn’t a comment on the paper by the way, which I glanced at but did not have the background knowledge to fully comprehend)
[0] See the section labeled “RealPage Uses Multiple Mechanisms To Increase Compliance With Price Recommendations” https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/01/21/2026-01...
Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#33The actual paper's title is "Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP" Seems that HN's auto-headline rewriting in this case has made a critical error :) >Artificial intelligence, by expanding firms' computational capabilities, is pushing markets from the competitive regime toward the collusive regime, explaining the empirical emergence of algorithmic collusion without explicit coordination. I have to dig more i…
or maybe compute allows simulating a lot of possible cooperation strategies, and arriving at the one maximizing profits for the colluding parties
Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#34Would anyone mind explaining what P and NP are?
I have taken algorithms courses.
This video explains in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX40hbAHx3s
In short, P means Polynomial time (i.e. markets can solve computation problems efficiently) and NP means Non-Deterministic Polynomial time (i.e. markets can verify solutions of computation problems efficiently but solutions are found by luck).
If P != NP, it means luck CANNOT be engineered and markets are competitive.
Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#35Markets are competitive if and only if P === NP! Now seriously, I wonder if AI collusion/use in investments would add to the market inefficiency and create opportunities for observing investors.
NP factorial sounds like NP-ultra-hard.
Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#36Very interesting. The author claims to have proved that markets can be informationally efficient or competitive, but not both. The implications for policy and regulation are significant. The author looks credible: https://philipmaymin.com/about-philip Thank you for sharing this on HN. -- To the mods: The title needs to be edited to replace the equal sign with not-equal.
So it pulls exclamation marks. . .angle brackets maybe? “=“ “!=“
UTF8 to the rescue: ≠
Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#37The actual paper's title is "Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP" Seems that HN's auto-headline rewriting in this case has made a critical error :) >Artificial intelligence, by expanding firms' computational capabilities, is pushing markets from the competitive regime toward the collusive regime, explaining the empirical emergence of algorithmic collusion without explicit coordination. I have to dig more i…
Yeah, the most obvious recent example of this is RealPage’s YieldStar product. It advised property managers on what they should set their rental rates to, and allegedly established a cartel in which RealPage’s customers coordinated in pricing their units. YieldStar was technically an “AI” product, but I don’t really think the computational abilities were what enabled the collusion. RealPage’s employees (according to…
I’m not sure the use of a common algorithm was the most damming part of that. They also pooled otherwise proprietary information and penalized landlords who failed to follow the “recommendations”
You could imagine the exact same scheme without the use of a computer.
Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#38Very interesting. The author claims to have proved that markets can be informationally efficient or competitive, but not both. The implications for policy and regulation are significant. The author looks credible: https://philipmaymin.com/about-philip Thank you for sharing this on HN. -- To the mods: The title needs to be edited to replace the equal sign with not-equal.
assuming the typical "spherical market in a vacuum where the agents are maximally rational non-biological utility maximizers"
Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#39When everyone uses AI to study the same indicators and figures out how the prices move with those indicators they all start investing at the same time and the prices move together. AI silently gets everyone on the same page.
Sounds like soviet communist Sci-Fi with a planned economy managed objectively by The Computer.
Re: Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP
#40When everyone uses AI to study the same indicators and figures out how the prices move with those indicators they all start investing at the same time and the prices move together. AI silently gets everyone on the same page.
It’s a great excuse for collusion