The company behind popular property management software YieldStar is facing a class-action lawsuit, at least in part thanks to ProPublica's reporting. Is this deserved?
1. The rental market is nothing like the stock market. Rent transparency is entirely asymmetric. There is no YieldStar for renters. Such asymmetry cannot make a fair market. Moving also involves significant transaction costs and upheaval, unlike zero-fee stock trades.
3. You can most certainly have antitrust violations without explicit price fixing: payments to delay generics and employee non-poaching agreements among Google, Adobe, etc. are just two examples of many deemed to have violated antitrust laws without explicit collusion or price fixing.
4. Scale and transaction costs matter. YieldStar makes trivial what would previously have required dozens or hundreds of phone calls and hours of work to collect a tiny fraction of the data in an Excel spreadsheet that would be obsolete in a month. Automating this process can distort the rental market just as algorithmic trading has distorted the financial market.
These are just the factual problems with your naive take. The much bigger problem is that you wrote this without testing your own biases, opting instead for snark, which calls into question your intelligence and supposed objectivity.
Breech instead of Breach.
1. The rental market is nothing like the stock market. Rent transparency is entirely asymmetric. There is no YieldStar for renters. Such asymmetry cannot make a fair market. Moving also involves significant transaction costs and upheaval, unlike zero-fee stock trades.
2. An almost perfect analog to YieldStar is the airline ticket reservation systems and the DOJ sanctioned airlines for almost identical anticompetitive behavior 1994. https://www.justice.gov/archive/atr/public/press_releases/1994/211786.htm
3. You can most certainly have antitrust violations without explicit price fixing: payments to delay generics and employee non-poaching agreements among Google, Adobe, etc. are just two examples of many deemed to have violated antitrust laws without explicit collusion or price fixing.
4. Scale and transaction costs matter. YieldStar makes trivial what would previously have required dozens or hundreds of phone calls and hours of work to collect a tiny fraction of the data in an Excel spreadsheet that would be obsolete in a month. Automating this process can distort the rental market just as algorithmic trading has distorted the financial market.
These are just the factual problems with your naive take. The much bigger problem is that you wrote this without testing your own biases, opting instead for snark, which calls into question your intelligence and supposed objectivity.