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- Hacker News
- This is what I think of when I think of personalized pricing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlT3uHlNAg&t=111s
It's pretty much what I've done when selling at flea markets all of my life. I ask what I think the market will bear, per person and situation. I don't feel at all guilty for it. It doesn't surprise me at all that mass customization in the information age has brought us to it at scale, or that the force of law would be necessary to repress it.
Some people seem to feel they have a right to the best price without negotiating or shopping. I don't feel that I'm owed or owe that privilege.
by delichon - It is because you're on the side benefitting from it. It doesn't benefit the consumer or the working class.by b345
- How much did you know about the person you were selling to? Did you know what websites they visited or what past purchases they made or what time they went to sleep every night?by Eisenstein
- I come from a culture where the price is always listed. If I don't like the price, I'll either find a better deal somewhere else (shop) or not buy. Any time I'm forced to barter with a person I lose, because I do feel guilty about it. I feel bad that you won't get as much money as you think you should, despite the low balance in my bank account.
Some people seem to feel they have a right to help others get ripped off because they're not schemers. I don't feel I owe you that.
- How do I negotiate with a minimum wage cashier, self-checkout, or a checkout page? Have you ever been in a Kroger property, or Walmart, or any other multi-billion dollar retailer and negotiated on something? Maybe they'll price match and I guess that counts, but it's not as if we have access to data to do that in a meaningful way to compete with the data that they have to act on.
In lieu of suppressing surveillance pricing, I could live with retailers being forced to open source, in real time, all product and sales related data, including historical as far back as they have.
by m4ck_ - I agree that surveillance pricing sounds terrible and discriminatory. But people are also happy with coupons, codes, introductory pricing, employee discounts and many of the other schemes that do more or less the same thing. One guy who worked for an athletic shoe company told me that they had a special code that their sponsored athletes could give to their friends.
In the end, what's the difference?
by xhkkffbf - Actually many people thoroughly detest forced "memberships" to pay the actual price of the item, digital coupons, forced use of apps, and all of the other utter nonsense. I hope surveillance pricing bills destroy all of them forever.by sgc
- My take on this isn't directly related to the surveillance side of it, but from what I can tell we used to have this model:
Most stores and restaurant chains had normal prices, and sale/special prices. You could coupon like mad and save some serious money by going around to a bunch of different places, with them probably losing money on many of those transactions as long as you were disciplined and didn't buy non-couponed items, but it was a ton of work.
(Another model was to have had fake, way-too-high [like, double what they should be] full prices, but 2/3 of those kinds of stores were always "on sale" at what should be the normal price anyway. A disgusting psychological trick and tacit lie that we probably should have found some way to effectively crack down on, but pretty easy to spot and it was no big deal to avoid the places that did this, especially since most of them sold crappy goods anyway. This model's still around, I'm just not really concerned with it here and mentioning it as an aside to acknowledge that it existed, and exists)
Now we have this model:
A very-few stores and restaurant chains still follow the old model, but most now have batshit crazy "normal" prices, require an app (so, spying) and shopping specials to get what should be the normal prices, and then sometimes you do still get an actual bargain.
The net result is that if you just want reasonable fucking baseline prices and not to be gouged, you now have to spend more time and attention than before.
I'm convinced this is a big part of why there's a perception that inflation is even worse than official measurements say it is. I can say it's a major contributing factor to it feeling like our financial situation is worse than it was six years ago, despite making quite a bit more money now. We were finally at a point where we didn't really need to pay attention to sales and such at most normal stores, just didn't matter enough to us to save an extra couple bucks and we could finally relax a little when shopping, like pay attention to which interchangeable thing was cheaper and maybe grab things if we saw a sale but we didn't need to structure our grocery lists around deals. Now? They've price-discriminated via attention and allowing-tracking (those damn apps) so much that we have to pay lots of attention and have their damn advertising prodding us all the time (the apps) again just to not get entirely screwed every time we go to a store. We feel poorer again.
In short, I think a somewhat-obscure online rant-song about Taco Bell contains more insight about how normal people are experiencing the US economy since Covid, than most serious economic reporting does.
Lyrics:
https://genius.com/Jeff-heiny-deserving-taco-bell-rant-lyric...
Song, such as it is (warning: lo-fi screamo, more or less):
by clarance - The difference is in degree, and with the point that coupons/discounts/dynamic pricing have gotten to I think we would be better off if those things started getting banned as well. The main point of all of these things is to confuse the market and make it less efficient (so that companies can extract value instead of creating more value). We've gotten to a breaking point, and we should reject all of it rather than justifying new abusive dynamics based on the less-harsh dynamics having been tolerable before companies became completely shameless.by mindslight
- Well, they're all discounts, for starters.
Surveillance pricing defenders claim that surveillance pricing is better because it works both ways--it might offer a higher price to someone who is desperate, but someone who is likely not that motivated might get a sweet deal. I highly doubt that. A highly-advertised, transparent discount or sale is how you sell to someone who is not that motivated. Surveillance pricing is how you (secretly) extract as much money as possible from the desperate.
by robrtsql - > what's the difference?
For me, it's the surveillance infrastructure per se. My main curiosity around these bills is to what extent surveillance pricing–versus ad targeting–drives the economics of those systems. (My prior is not much.)
- I don't understand why they have carveouts for loyalty programs.
I know safeway for instance raises prices on just about everything, and to lower them you need to register for a loyalty program by providing personal information "voluntarily".
we should have the ability to say "I decline loyalty program membership" with the same price. (for example maybe by giving 888-888-8888 as a phone number)
this is basically the same thing as surveillance pricing, but you voluntarily tell them yourself.
by m463 - I generally agree with the statements here but the example of the baby thermometers seems to be a false equivalence since there is no variation of pricing of the products but instead it's a personalized search results page that takes into account what they think this person might want. It actually would seem silly that a newborn parent would NOT want a baby thermometer and it just so happens that baby thermometers tend to be pricier. I know the stance from the EFF is likely that everyone should see the same search results and only allow a direct ly expressed query to influence the sorting/ranking.by calbear81
- Wish everyone in this thread defending surveillance pricing would disclose their employersby 4d4m
- I suspect part of the reason this is playing well on this website is banning surveillance pricing is great for rich people. I don't have the time or inclination to coupon or aggressively cross-shop but I benefit a lot from the less well-off folks who do. The grocery store, without any ability to differentiate, has to assume that I might be one of those people and sell me a banana at the same price.by benced
- Great for rich people or just not your relative purchasing power being completely eroded. Why work for a 5% raise if it means all your expenses go up 5%?by davemp
- Possibly, to add the anti-discrimination law, one of the other things that is protected against discrimination would be the computers (including kind of computers and lack of computers). Then, they cannot expect you to have a app to get a discount.
Additionally, in situations where it would be reasonable, to publish the catalogs including prices and to allow them to be distributed. (My idea of a computer payment file, additionally requires that the catalog file have a proof of work field.)
- To me it's insane how popular surveillance pricing is in discussions on HN. I think that so far it is the pinnacle of useless rent-seeking from the tech-finance alliance. Bit by bit eliminating the 'inefficiency' of people not giving companies the last few cents they have remaining. Evil.
At first I was quick to assume that the proponents of these schemes work in adtech, data harvesting and processing companies, or are just extremely rich and poised to become the beneficiaries of all the surveillance. But so many people are bringing up things like regional pricing for poor countries, coupons or other types of discount that it makes me feel like they think this will benefit them. Are we really about to fall for the 'if you just let us track you, you will be rewarded!' scheme all over again? Did we forget when credit scores were promised to provide anything positive to the customers, but instead became exclusively a way to punish the worst offenders? You don't get anything from a good credit score anymore. Or what about letting your car insurance company track your movements under the promise of discounts which quickly turned into the promise of a lack of a punitive rate hike if you drive well?
Giving you a good deal is not profitable. Whatever mind tricks you think you'll be able to play under a surveillance pricing regime will not work. They will always be three steps ahead of you.
by tavavex - Let's take your credit score example for a second. There's a similar argument elsewhere here but why do you think the 800+ credit score loan rate (let's say $500/mo for the sake of argument) is the base rate, and anyone paying more than $500/mo is getting screwed? Is it not equally likely that the default is the highest payment there is?
Obviously reality is probably somewhere in the middle.
by pc86 - I had an interesting conversation with an coworker recently -
If you give an agent a budget of $500 to buy a flight, and the airline knows this and bumps your price to $499 even though it will offer the same flight at $300 to someone else, is there harm done? I argued it feels unjust. He said it's totally fair, it's within budget so what's the problem?
Naturally this trends towards a sort of principal-agent problem where the airline is incentivized to bribe your agent for up to $198 to max out your budget (which is a problem if you're not running your own agent).
But for general personalized pricing, there is the same dynamic to posture that you have a limited budget so that companies offer you better prices (regardless of whether you really do or not). This is haggling culture at scale.
I worry about a world trending towards this sort of thing and away from clearly universal prices and wrote about this at the beginning of the year: https://digitalseams.com/blog/the-behavioral-cost-of-persona...)
by bobbiechen - I’d ask that coworker, “so you would be okay with paying $10 per gallon of gas, while the Prius that barely uses gas next to you pays only $3 per gallon? You use more gas, which means it is in your budget to afford, right?” (Or pick another alternative that is applicable.)
Inverting the argument almost always exposes cracks, because they will immediately switch to why it’s not the same.
by therealpygon - You've just described the golden age of piracy (itself a principal agent problem, and imo it'll be solved like piracy was). It's also a good example of the "If I break a butcher's windows and cause him to buy a new pane, haven't I done good?" And the answer is no. What you've described is a poor/inefficient allocation of money.by halJordan
- The problem is that it completely eliminates the consumer surplus from the transaction and converts it to producer surplus. It basically erases all benefits of capitalism for the average person.
If it becomes the norm to charge the maximum that someone is willing to pay in every consumer transaction, then business owners are almost forcing average people to try to end capitalism.
- Like most people, surveillance pricing feels gross to me. But I think we need to separate two things: Surveillance pricing is a combination of (a) price discrimination and (b) surveillance.
If it were up to me, I'd probably give people much stronger legal rights to control their personal information, which would in turn decrease "surveillance".
But I haven't seen a convincing argument to ban price discrimination. There seems to be some kind of implicit assumption that price discrimination reduces consumer surplus on average. But I've never seen a convincing argument to that effect.
For example: Pharmaceuticals are often priced much low in poor countries. That's price discrimination. (You could think of it as a primitive form of surveillance pricing.) But if that were banned, pharmaceutical companies wouldn't lower prices for everyone. That would destroy almost all their revenue which comes from high prices in rich countries. Instead, they'd charge rich-country prices to everyone, and most people in poor countries would simply have to go without. That seems like it would be pure harm.
It's entirely possible that some kind of "coarse" price discrimination is OK/good but "fine-grained" price discrimination is bad. But where's the argument?
by dynm - Simple
There are two ways to legally "earn" money. The first is to provide a product or service that is sufficiently valuable the buyer willingly parts with the money for the price.
The other is extractive — to find a way to exploit the customer with limited choices and extract the maximum value from them. Monopoly pricing is the primary example — people need electricity, housing, food, etc. and if someone corners those markets, or colludes, they can extract a far higher amount of money from people than they would willingly spend in an actually free market of multiple competitors and fully available information (wherein another competitor would offer prices closer to the cost of production and take the business from the overpriced competitor).
Production of value is the essence of the value of capitalism. Extracting value by coercion is fundamentally corrupt, and at the extreme end is nothing more than mob rule ("nice store windows you got there, it'd be a shame if something happened to them; pay us for protection").
Surveillance pricing is simply a fundamentally dishonest form of the latter, exploiting massive amounts of information on customers to extract more money from a person than they would be freely willing to pay for a product, because you found a temporary or permanent vulnerability and 'have them over a barrel'.
A society that permits surveillance pricing will inevitably become more impoverished because the few players doing surveillance pricing will extract more money from the society WITHOUT creating any more value. This impairs everyone else's ability to provide value.
Allowing it is fundamentally stupid and self-destructive.
by toss1 - Different countries use different money, and also if they sell in the place then it can still be a price for the different place, which does not necessarily involve surveillance, nor does it necessarily involve hidden fees, etc.
(If they try to prevent someone from buying them and using them elsewhere or buying one for a specific other person who requested it who they do not know, then that is different, but it might lead to different issues (e.g. liability of tampering with medications, different regulations in different countries, etc).)
- Poor countries aren't in danger from this... we can't ban price discrimination in other countries because they have sovereignty, and the pharmaceutical company isn't monolithic. The one operating in another country is another corporation that must follow that countries rules, and will be granted a license from the American parent company to decide for itself what pricing to impose there (which will be controlled by that country's laws on drug pricing).
It's how it works now, and we don't much have the ability to change that. If we tried, the pharmaceutical companies would be in danger... those countries can spin up factories to make the same drugs and just ignore the patents. A behavior/strategy they want to avoid encouraging.
- > But I haven't seen a convincing argument to ban price discrimination.
The very definition of "price discrimination" is the convincing argument.
Meanwhile, dynm:"How much does this candy bar cost?" "Well, you social credit profile says you payed $700 for pair of shoes last week so... twelve grand." "But the guy in front of me just paid 35 cents for the same candy bar." "Well, I mean, *he* is white."> But where's the argument?
Looking to big pharma for guidance is depressingly hilarious.
- >But I haven't seen a convincing argument to ban price discrimination.
It's in the name. Does having a Mexican person pay more for taco shells than a Caucasian not immediately ring legal bells?
>Pharmaceuticals are often priced much low in poor countries. That's price discrimination. (You could think of it as a primitive form of surveillance pricing.)
That's not surveillance pricing in the same way that utilizing local cookies isn't personal data farming. It's the first step to a much more nebulous web, but no one is saying that businesses can't price based on the area. It's only when amassing millions of user's data that unexpected trends arise that such data becomes dangerous.
by johnnyanmac