Price robots (bots) are software programs that can quickly search the Internet to find pricing information and, if instructed, automatically use that information to change pricing behaviors. Bots can improve the consumer experience by, for example, immediately listing all neighborhood gasoline prices and relieving the consumer of the burden of driving around for the best price. Antitrust authorities, however, are increasingly concerned about harm, such as price fixing, emerging from the use of pricing bots. Read the brief 2016 Harvard Business Review article by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi, “How Pricing Bots Could Form Cartels and Make Things More Expensive” [https:// hbr.org./2016/10/how-pricing-bots-could-form-cartels-and-make-things-more-expensive]. 

Answer the following questions. 

1. Explain how the use of pricing bots might facilitate conscious parallelism or tacit collusion. 

2. Discuss how the use of pricing bots might discourage new, competitive initiatives that we count on to drive commercial progress.