Summary: Hate shopping? The next generation of e-commerce will be conducted by digital agents, based on algorithms that will not only make purchase recommendations, but will also predict what we want, make purchase decisions, negotiate and execute the transaction for the consumers, and even automatically form coalitions of buyers to enjoy better terms, thereby replacing human decision-making. Algorithmic consumers have the potential to change dramatically the way we conduct business, raising new conceptual and regulatory challenges. This game-changing technological development has significant implications for regulation, which should be adjusted to a reality of consumers making their purchase decisions via algorithms. Despite this challenge, scholarship addressing commercial algorithms focused primarily on the use of algorithms by suppliers. In this presentation Michal Gal and Niva Elkin-Koren explore the technological advances which are shaping algorithmic consumers, and analyze how these advances affect the competitive dynamic in the market. They analyze the implications of such technological advances on regulation, identifying three main challenges. They further discuss some of the challenges to human autonomous choice that arise from these developments, and examine whether the existing legal framework is adequate to address them. For more on this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2017/04/AlgorithmicConsumers
