You mean a company becoming more efficient at extracting money from their un-informed customers. A company finding new ways to leverage their market power, position, and information asymmetry.
Note, the post this is a reply to originally said "You mean a company becoming more efficient at extracting money from customers".
I don't see how consolidation into a couple of major players swallowing most of the companies in the space is avoidable. It's Booking Holdings vs Expedia Group all over again.
Is my understanding incorrect?
[1] Not perfect
Tinder is entitled to charge as much as they want to whoever they want as long as they're not discriminating against a protected class.
The free market resolution requires competition, though. There might be a reasonable case to be made that products that don't have comparable competition can't be priced in a way that exploits different customers by charging more for receiving the same service or good?
I don't think there's anything comparable to tinder that found be considered legitimate competition- match.com, Madison, adult friend finder, etc are operating in very different markets with very different tools and expectations.
Price discrimination[1] relies on market power. This is a completely uncontroversial thing. Any discussion on price discrimination will tie back to market power.
1. Not a judgement here. This is a technical term from microeconomics.
If one thinks of commerce as "willing buyer,willing seller" then a transaction occurs at the point where both sides are content with the money/product swap. What other people paid for the same product is only tangentially relevant - if I'm happy with the transaction today why should I be less happy tomorrow based on someone else's transaction?
Outside the US you see this in places where markets are more fluid, and in some places have no pricing at all. You are expected to haggle (I mean, negotiate) - failure to do so makes a fool of the vendor to offer first too low a price.
In other words, the world is unfair. Sometimes in your favour, sometimes against. The sooner one accepts that the easier life becomes..
Equally though unfairness creates a gap in the market. Girls toys cost more than boys toys (same toy, different package) suggests an opportunity.
[1] for the purposes of this discussion I'm not talking about protected classes, such as race. There are some unfairness that are considered to be unacceptable.
jealousy. Even animal studies have shown that monkeys who sees another monkey receive more reward for the same "work" gets angry (i recall it was some experiment where one monkey got "paid" in grapes, while another was paid in something else less desirable - i forgot what - and initially both were happy, as they did not see each other's payment, but once the monkey saw the grape reward, they refused their reward and got angry).
Obviously there are cases where you'll never get the grapes, but that's why we have executive function.
If Tinder wants to overcharge certain demographics, they have to do it to the majority or offer something of equivalent value to them in return.
It's a problem because it puts consumers at an even further disadvantage in a game that's already stacked against them. That you're still willing to pay makes no difference - you're still worse off than before.
Maybe it would be somewhat fair if consumers had their own well-funded departments, studying corporations to determine the lowest price they'd still be willing to sell a product for, and then collectively negotiating the price.
But we don't, and it would be a waste of humanity's limited time to play these zero-sum, when we can just make the behavior illegal.