Who Leads and Who Collects: Algorithmic Collusion in Markets of Heterogeneous Language Models

Jun Yeong Lee · 2026 · SSRN Electronic Journal

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.7579998 · cited by 0 works (OpenAlex) · open-access PDF

Abstract

Evidence that pricing algorithms collude comes from markets in which every seller runs the same algorithm. We ask what happens when they do not. Four language models from four providers, each at its cheapest tier, price in a four-firm logit Bertrand market without communication, in every homogeneous, two-by-two and fully mixed composi- tion (11 cells, 20 runs, 200 periods). Collusion is a property of the model: Claude and Gemini markets reach 72 to 79 percent of the monopoly rent, DeepSeek markets 24 percent, and GPT markets none, though GPT prices drift above the monopoly level rather than to

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Topics: Collusion, Monopoly, Homogeneous, Economics, Microeconomics, Transitive relation

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