Surveillance Pricing: Exploiting Information Asymmetries
lpeproject.org
lpeproject.org
For the other categories, it is usually not explicit, but it definitely happens, especially when haggling is involved.
Student and senior discounts are meant as support/benefits/encouragment, to the poorer and weaker.
The commercial version is about the inverse: skinning every group as much as possible.
The problem is that the value of these information markets creates all the wrong incentives. Companies layer surveillance into everything to subsidize other businesses, and people expect free search and email, and cheap home security even at others' tiny cost.
It's too bad these services live forever as cash cows to subsidize crazy ideas and schemes. They should graduate to public utilities once the product stabilizes.
In essence if you take capitalism to it's max you will eventually meet Marx.
Hm. This doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
If say 500 people take an Uber to a venue or need an Uber from the airport, increasing the price more often than not is just going to increase revenue. The price increase doesn't force you into an alternative choice if there are no alternatives.
Many places don't have substantial taxi or similar services, and public transit doesn't meet that same need with people in suburbs / ex-urbs / rural.
i mean, if you posit inelastic demand, you dont get you pretend you derived it as a conclusion right?
But never high enough to meaningfully dilute or really in any way change demand, and by raising the number of drivers, the parent company ultimately still makes more profit.
This seems self reinforcing.
> i mean, if you posit inelastic demand, you dont get you pretend you derived it as a conclusion right?
I'm not pretending anything, I'm considering the reality on the ground when I travel across the US.
literally you restating inelastic demand assumption
> I'm considering the reality on the ground
oh, reality is on your side. whoops i didn't realize i was arguing with reality. so you are definitionally correct?
Your thinking is overly rigid here. An action can be multiple things at the same time. Uber's incentive is to maximize transactions per unit time window. You are correct in that surge pricing on a first level pass isn't about profit maximization. You have to go up a layer of a straction or two before that becomes the case. Uber has to increase supply to fulfill transactions for a signalled demand, signalled demand is high, thus signaling more profit to be made, therefore the surge while at first seeming like a negative signal to consumers, is still acting systemically as a mechanism to bring about profit maximization.
Hiding this type of thing from the end consumer, or not saying it out loud, is a favorite of the current batch of business people.
He told me some 80 developers. Bit surprised and thinking probably recruiter is too noob and quoting me the size of the development team, I asked him again that no, I'm interested in knowing my team size.
He instead corrected me saying that he's not talking about whole engineering team, he's talking about the pricing team that is a sub team inside the data science team and I'll be joining the pricing team that alone has 80 developers.
I worked at an insurance company that had very similar numbers. Went as well as you suspect.
One of the things to think about is the way that lots of average businessmen have always been able to rake in the bucks without resorting to any type of predatory approaches coming anything close to this.
Probably more so in less-modern times, like before MBA's had yet made significant impact. And some of these were much rougher times economically.
The contrast can be so dramatic that there's a major logical conclusion about operators who run their businesses this way now.
They're just plain below-average businessmen.
I was doing that in the late 90s. Not marking up prices, but displaying higher priced hotels at the top of search returns. It was surprisingly effective when we compared aggregated per night rates between Mac and Windows users (as identified by user-agent).
For example, understanding that you are being “targeted” by these algorithm for premium extraction and taking measures such as spinning up VPNs, clearing cache/history, etc to save the consumer from overpaying.
Seems like a good market for such a product would exist…
Some day i might find the time and energy to expand keepassxc to manage fictitious identities and tie them to accounts.
It is a tone shift tho, the new leader of the NDP in Canada is using the term now.
But yeah, I do spend as much money at local/regional businesses as I can. And I've started donating to local charities to help my neighbors.
Then that would be the main issue and far worse then the algorithms, that's a monopoly or cartel and not a free market. Because in a competitive market prices will be competitive with very little arbitrage.
Why would you try to one-down on price if an “objective statistical AI algorithm” tells you you’d be leaving money on the table without gaining market share to compensate? All it takes is for the market to be sufficiently concentrated at that point.