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Sprint projectOct 25, 2026cape town

Parallel-Conduct-Is-Not-Agreement

Mufaro Rukuni · Team parallel com

Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Mutual-information-style detectors ask whether two agents' actions are dependent. In a market they always are: every seller reacts to the same demand shock and to the same rival prices, so an auditor using dependence alone charges sellers with colluding for the crime of facing the same market. This project measures that failure (pricing_innocent_parallelism is flagged at a higher dependence level than either actual arrangement), builds a better instrument (the innocent null as a fitted reaction function rather than as a hypothesis of independence, plus localisation and conduct factors that survive it), and reports honestly what still cannot be detected: a market-wide agreement has no outsider to contrast against, and a deterministic convention leaves almost no residual dependence for any information-theoretic statistic to find.

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  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
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  4. 4Well presented. Easy to follow, well-structured, appropriate level of detail. Target audience would get it quickly.
  5. 5Exceptionally clear. A pleasure to read. Complex ideas made accessible. Could serve as a model for how to present this type of work.
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Cite this project

@misc{rukuni2026parallelconductisnotagreement,
  title = {{Parallel-Conduct-Is-Not-Agreement}},
  author = {Mufaro Rukuni},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/parallelconductisnotagreement-tw3u}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/parallelconductisnotagreement-tw3u}
}

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