The judge noted that the plaintiffs do not allege that the casino defendants’ proprietary data are pooled or otherwise comingled into a common dataset. Merely using the software in question does not count as a conspiracy, she said.
A federal judge in New Jersey has dismissed a suit claiming that some Atlantic City casinos used pricing software to unlawfully fix rates for hotel rooms.
It follows an earlier dismissal of a Nevada case involving similar claims.
The plaintiffs failed to establish a plausible price-fixing conspiracy among the defendant casinos because there were wide variations in the time periods when the casino defendants used the software, U.S. District Judge Karen Williams ruled.
In addition, the algorithm’s pricing recommendations offered to each hotel were not based on competitors’ data because the plaintiffs failed to allege that the hotels ever comingled their room rate information in a common dataset, Williams ruled when she dismissed the suit, Cornish-Adebiyi v. Caesars Entertainment.
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