The complaint filed Wednesday in
It accuses the resorts and
The Associated Press sent an email to Rainmaker seeking comment.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of plaintiffs
It seeks class status and unspecified monetary damages for “tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands” of people based on alleged antitrust violations of the federal Sherman Act.
“The claims against
In a statement, plaintiffs' attorney
“What happens in Vegas will no longer stay in Vegas,” Berman said. “We intend to expose the under-the-table deals perpetrated by these Vegas hotels.”
“Rest assured, they watch each other,” Feldman said. “Then they can decide if they want to go above it, below it, or just ignore it.”
“But I can’t imagine these companies talking to one another,” he said, “and certainly not on price.”
The lawsuit points to concerns about algorithmic pricing identified in a 2017 speech by
Ohlhausen defined a computer algorithm as a set of rules or instructions that can model thousands of “extremely complex and nuanced behaviors” in a fraction of a second “and react almost instantaneously to changes.”
She said companies provide their pricing data to “a common, outside agent” that uses the information to program its algorithm “to maximize industry-wide pricing.”
“We even have an old-fashioned term for it,” Ohlhausen said, “the hub-and-spoke conspiracy.”
“In effect, the firms themselves don’t directly share their pricing strategies,” she said, “but that information still ends up in common hands, and that shared information is then used to maximize market-wide prices.”
The court filing said two former Rainmaker employees told attorneys the company's products are used by 90% or “just about every” property on the resort-lined Las Vegas Strip. The lawsuit didn't identify the former employees.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that average daily room rates for Strip resorts hit record highs in 2022, topping
For the year through November, the average rate was
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