by Malcolm Girand*
Section 1 of the Sherman Act reaches only concerted action, whereas parallel outcomes that reflect independent business judgment remain lawful. The proliferation of shared algorithmic pricing tools has strained that line, and courts have divided over what a plaintiff must plead to establish an unlawful agreement. Some have dismissed these claims at the threshold, treating the absence of a clearly alleged agreement as dispositive and requiring allegations that virtually negated independent explanations at the pleading stage. This Contribution argues that such an approach misreads Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, importing an evidentiary demand associated with trial and summary judgment into Rule 12. It further argues that courts should recognize reciprocal algorithmic data-pooling—competitors contributing their own nonpublic, competitively sensitive, current data to a common pricing system that uses those data in generating recommendations for known rivals, with each contributor aware of the reciprocal arrangement—as a plus factor to infer agreement from parallel conduct. Because such reciprocal algorithmic data-pooling is difficult to explain as ordinary unilateral conduct and strongly suggests mutual assurance, it ordinarily suffices—joined with parallel conduct and the remaining elements of the claim—to support a plausible inference of agreement and reach discovery.