ALGORITHMIC COLLUSION AND THE LIMITS OF SECTION 3 OF THE COMPETITION ACT, 2002: RETHINKING ‘AGREEMENT’ IN THE AGE OF AUTONOMOUS PRICING

Section 3 of the Competition Act, 2002 prohibits anti-competitive agreements, but its core requirement of a “meeting of minds” sits uneasily with pricing algorithms that can produce cartel-like outcomes without any human communication at all. This paper examines the Supreme Court's decision in Samir Agrawal v. Competition Commission of India, arguing that it settles only a narrow, single-platform fact pattern and leaves genuinely untested the harder case of independent competing platforms whose algorithms learn to track each other's prices. Drawing on the American plus-factors doctrine and the European Union's shift toward ex-ante regulation, the paper proposes a two-track Indian response: a doctrinal clarification of concerted practice for provable algorithmic monitoring, and a narrowly targeted ex-ante framework, along the lines of the proposed Digital Competition Bill, for the small set of platforms capable of sustaining purely autonomous coordination.