I encourage the author to take an economics class. There's a common trend of smart people trying to fumble through what amount to the first semester of economics. Even a brief exposure gives you enough knowledge to know the name of what you are interested in.
In this case, it's an argument for price discrimination -- charging different prices to different buyers based on their willingness to pay. And in fact "textbooks" is one of the examples given on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination#Textbooks
This allows you to lean on what's already known. Specifically, identifying market segments with different elasticity and enforcing the scheme.
Have people started using the phrase "purchasing power parity" to refer to a pricing scheme that corrects for PPP? I think "parity" might be leading people astray because it actually just refers to an adjustment to GDP or other indicators for purchasing power. It doesn't refer to a pricing scheme. I could suggest the name "Purchasing Power Parity Pricing" if you want something you can say you "support".
(That said: I think this is isolated to extremely high margin goods and will not translate to others.)
They are misusing the term for what they are doing. What they created is a program that price discriminates. Price discrimination based on purchasing power parity is a much more accurate description of what they are doing rather than just just purchasing power parity. Of course, it is possible that the author knows this, and is just avoiding using the term 'price discrimination' since it sounds bad outside of the academic context.
They aren't necessarily leaving money on the table, although an argument can be made that purchasing power parity isn't the best mechanism for profit maximizing using price discrimination.
The point the OP is trying to make is that this isn't some revolutionary new tactic that the author invented by understanding PPP on a deeper level than anyone else. This is a concept learned in intro to economics. And one that is used by a lot of online service providers already.
Maybe. Economics also has quite bad terms for many things. Like discrimination here, or "rational". It's like maths and programming, you can find useful things in category theory but it's not necessarily useful to adopt it as a framework in your communication.
In this case, it's an argument for price discrimination -- charging different prices to different buyers based on their willingness to pay. And in fact "textbooks" is one of the examples given on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination#Textbooks
This allows you to lean on what's already known. Specifically, identifying market segments with different elasticity and enforcing the scheme.
Have people started using the phrase "purchasing power parity" to refer to a pricing scheme that corrects for PPP? I think "parity" might be leading people astray because it actually just refers to an adjustment to GDP or other indicators for purchasing power. It doesn't refer to a pricing scheme. I could suggest the name "Purchasing Power Parity Pricing" if you want something you can say you "support".
(That said: I think this is isolated to extremely high margin goods and will not translate to others.)