The advent of reinforcement learning (RL) in financial markets is driven by several advantages inherent to this field of artificial intelligence. In particular, RL allows to combine the "prediction" and the "portfolio construction" task in one integrated step, thereby closely aligning the...

A novel debate within competition policy and regulation circles is whether autonomous machine learning algorithms may learn to collude on prices. We show that when firms face short-run price commitments, independent Q-learning (a simple but well-established self-learning algorithm) learns to...