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Comment by ivanovm | Hacker News Reader

the funny part about the backlash is that the travel budgets are likely somewhat pareto distributed and under the not-personalized pricing strategy it is the little guy who is probably overpaying for plane tickets, not the corporations and the wealthy individuals

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It's not usually up to businesses to compensate wealth inequality by adapting prices to customers.

I personally find this appalling, not because of the prospect of paying more or less, but because of the arbitrariness and opacity of it all. I'm not too excited for a future where we'll have to spoof various browser identities and try different times of day and VPNs to book plane tickets...

At the extreme, some people could find themselves stuck or in very difficult situations because of this kind of practice. Oh, your parent is on their deathbed? Shouldn't have said that to a friend on Messenger or WhatsApp.

And I don't understand what could possibly justify personalized pricing (towards consumers, not businesses) of non-personalized goods and services being legal in the first place.

Historically, all prices are negotiated. We ended up with a culture of flat pricing for efficiency, with only a few high value items like cars being negotiated. You walk into a car dealer and spend hours to determine exactly how much they can get you to pay for the car you want. But now with advanced automation, it's worth the complexity to extract the maximum value out of each customer again, even on small purchases of a dollar or two.

This is an interesting way to think about it. I would argue that flat pricing wasn’t for efficiency but “fairness”.

And also point out that AI driven price discrimination isn’t anywhere close to negotiated. You’re stuck with the price the machine gives you, with little to no recourse, short of rewriting your entire digital life!

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