>There's a huge difference between researching your competition and coordinating with them
If you read my comment carefully, you'd see that I was specifically talking about "independently derive the optimal price", not any sort of coordination.
If you read my comment at all, you'd notice it leads with drawing a distinction between your hypothetical scenario and the actual case at hand. If you read my comment carefully, you might also notice that I'm being extra charitable by not pointing out that your hypothetical relies on oversimplifying how pricing signals operate in the real world. Of course you can make the problem seem to go away if you demand a simplification that elides all the details relevant to the problem.
>If you read my comment at all, you'd notice it leads with drawing a distinction between your hypothetical scenario and the actual case at hand.
And that distinction was specifically acknowledged in my original comment.
"Realpage goes beyond this by pressuring landlords to accept their recommended price, and that's probably what got them in hot water"
>If you read my comment carefully, you might also notice that I'm being extra charitable by not pointing out that your hypothetical relies on oversimplifying how pricing signals operate in the real world. Of course you can make the problem seem to go away if you demand a simplification that elides all the details relevant to the problem.
How does "how pricing signals operate in the real world" prevent my model from working? All you need is some sort of market research firm to provide key statistics like vacancy rate, disposable income, and average rent, and every landlord can arrive at approximately the same same rent.
Right, I think that's not the only distinction here. Yes, Realpage pushes its customers to accept its recommendations. But by centralizing where this research is done, it doesn't have to do that to be engaging in anticompetitive behavior, because it also aggregates data volunteered by other organizations you might be nominally competing with, and the more people are using this service, the less likely a competitor might have some information that's not publicly available (or even that is available but isn't part of some standard method of analysis) they might be using to compete on price. The centralization of this service across competing organizations unto itself is a form of price-fixing, regardless of whether the company also demands that you use its estimates
If you read my comment carefully, you'd see that I was specifically talking about "independently derive the optimal price", not any sort of coordination.