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- Hacker News
- At 176 pages I may read it but also I’m already so exhausted by this topic since nothing is changing.by bix6
- Why would a dynamic price be any less fair?
E.g. I'm using a per-mile car insurance policy with a device that monitors my behavior. I'm a conservative driver, so I save a lot of money. But if such systems become universal, stupid speeders will get heavily penalized because they won't be able to offload their risks onto everyone else.
So on the one hand, it's more fair to careful drivers. But on the other hand, it will logically remove all the "slack" in the system, which serves as a de-facto social safety net.
by cyberax - I'm just waiting for the class action suits when dynamic pricing is shown to disproportionately affect protected groups.by giantg2
- Of course in enterprise sales this has been the norm since forever, referred to as “value pricing”.
Back in the early days of laptops, I went to Oracle to give them a quote; while cooling my heels in the lobby I looked round, realized I was being an idiot, and so opened my laptop and increased the prices across the board.
by gumby - Competition, and being willing to shop around is the only thing that has ever kept prices down.by xnx
- I have a a modest proposal. Any company wishing to use this kind of dynamic pricing should be willing to submit itself to "dynamic taxation".
Under dynamic taxation, we the public, would examine that firm's books at the end of the fiscal year and decide how much taxes they owe based on their ability to pay.
Note that companies are not natural people, they do not have a fundamental right to exist. Just like under dynamic pricing, if the shareholders and board think their dynamic taxes are too high, they are perfectly free to just dissolve the company and use their capital elsewhere.
by timoth3y - My issue with dynamic pricing boils down to price discovery and information asymmetry.
When I buy something, I really don't know what it's supposed to cost. Barring atypical levels of research, I know how much it's worth to me, and how much it usually costs, and that's it.
But my supermarket knows almost exactly how much eggs are worth to me. If it can show me, and everyone else, a different price at different times of day, I'm no longer confident in my ability to "bargain" effectively with the supermarket. So while I can see some strong economic arguments for dynamic pricing, especially in cases like power or water usage where there's a very inflexible supply, I basically just don't trust that we won't get screwed.
Fixes could be possible. Maybe with a third party system for monitoring prices, quality, etc. But it's hard, and pretty obviously not solved in the current market, much less one with even more price complexity.
by Paedor - "Did you know that home insurers use aerial drones to study your rooftop? If the conditions signal neglect, they might cancel your coverage before an accident."
While there are certainly some issues of concern in the article and the reviewed book, the above seems like exactly what insurance companies should be doing: pricing (or making available) coverage based upon risk.
This is not much different from an auto insurance company raising your rates (or cancelling coverage) because you've received a number of speeding tickets, which implies increased future risk of loss.
In fact, I received a letter from my homeowners insurance company a couple years ago stating that they would not renew our coverage due to conditions that they'd observed (clearly from aerial imagery) including overgrown bushes touching the walls of the house and some larger tree branches growing over the house.
I had a landscaping company come and fix the issues, sent my own drone up to take new pictures, sent the company the pictures, and they agreed to continue coverage. And now my house has less future risk of damage. This seems like a win-win for both of us.
by sib