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Proof-Carrying Markets · 2026

Competition law for automated markets

Verifiable controls and evidence for algorithmic pricing.

The question this work asks: when software sets or recommends a price and a hard question arrives later — from an enforcer, a court, or the firm’s own board — what can anyone actually show about how that price was produced? I am testing whether the records available inside a declared boundary can support bounded factual claims about how a price was produced — while stating, on their face, what the boundary excludes, how much of the decision population was actually covered, and whose word each classification rests on. The question is what such records can carry, not whether they capture everything that shaped a price. They do not.

Think of it as a chain of custody for a price — one that identifies its own blind spots, and never claims its record proves the price was lawful.

Current work — circulating privately for expert criticism

The Four-Path Evidence-Gap Diagnostic
Two pages. For one defined price decision: which of the four paths that shaped it — runtime, training, control-plane, human/vendor — can present evidence reconstruct, and where must the answer remain indeterminate?
One price, inspected Interactive · 10 min
A synthetic walkthrough of one hotel price: the decision-level record, a vendor label a later inquiry put in dispute, an honest coverage gap — and what such a record can never establish.
What Can a Company Actually Prove About an Algorithmic Price?
The discussion memorandum (ten pages) and three working companions — a boundary statement, a worked shared-vendor scenario, and a proof/non-proof matrix. Circulating to a small panel of reviewers.

What this research never claims

No record of how a price was produced can establish that the price was lawful, that no coordination occurred, or that a market outcome was competitive. Those are conclusions for lawyers, economists and courts. The value of a production record lies in its narrowness: bounded facts, named issuers, measured coverage, honest gaps. A system that offered more would deserve nobody’s trust.

About

I trained as an engineer and as a lawyer — B.E. (Computer Science Engineering) from the Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology and LL.B. (University of Delhi) — and I am enrolled as an advocate with the Bar Council of Delhi, holding the Bar Council of India's certificate of practice. I also completed the London School of Economics’ online certificate course in the law and economics of mergers and acquisitions. This work sits where the engineering and the law meet: pricing systems are built artefacts, and the questions now being asked of them are legal ones. The analysis on this page is drawn from public documents; the interactive walkthrough is an invented scenario, not a description of any real firm. Nothing here is legal advice, and nothing creates a professional engagement.

Contact

saurabh@proofborne.com If you have been sent the materials for review: fatal defects first. “This is unclear or useless” is as valuable as praise.