On Tinder you get invited to pay $500/mo for some "super secret exclusive" version. I got prompted by the app with a free month - it is wall to wall high end escorts.
At some point you gotta accept that this is dystopia.
With something like airlines that isn’t always obvious. Is a sustainable airline industry the greatest value? Or is it better to have a boom-bust market where passengers have greater access to travel?
These look like arguments for making price discrimination illegal?
I think alternative to making it illegal could be demanding full disclosure to eliminate information disparity. If a company does it, it should make it clear that it does it, and disclose the price range and criteria to determine your price (the latter can be obfuscated by AI-washing though). It looks like in the EU the requirement to disclose the fact of using personalised pricing alone (without further detail) discourages most of retailers from using it.
It's been pretty common in the travel industry for quite a long time. There's pushback every now and then, but generally the "free market" isn't doing much in that regard.
The price floor is set by the marginal cost even with price discrimination. That's the same price floor as in a single price system. The poor gain little, if any, from price discrimination.
Without price discrimination airlines would raise prices and not fill their planes. Price discrimination allows them to extract as much as they can which maximizes the number of people who can fly
Price discrimination doesn't guarantee cheaper products for poor people.
E.g. the same shampoo when labeled for women here costs more.
Or say Netflix costs less in some regions that are considered poor, but the rich people there still pay the lesser price.
If a business is only viable by extracting the most from every individual instead of finding a fair price, is it really better for society that business exists?
What a about the principle of fairness and people being treated equally?
> E.g. the same shampoo when labeled for women here costs more.
Hmmm... is it really the "same" shampoo? In my experience, products aimed at women typically have fancier packaging, added scent, and often exotic ingredients (which may or may not have any actual effect).
All of those things cost more money.
It's like the argument about laundering and pressing women's blouses costing more than men's dress shirts.
Men's shirts are more or less standardized, and can be processed using semi-automated equipment, while women's blouses often have lace, ruffles, or other decoration, large fancy buttons, unusual cuts, etc. and have to be pressed by hand.
> What an about the principle of fairness and people being treated equally?
Life is not fair from the moment of conception choosing which parents and location you are born to.
> If a business is only viable by extracting the most from every individual instead of finding a fair price, is it really better for society that business exists?
A buyer buying for the lowest price they can and the seller selling for the highest price they can is the definition of a fair price. Since supply and demand curves are constantly in flux, the fair price is also constantly in flux. Hence the practice of haggling with every vendor in old school markets/bazaars, even for daily vegetables.
The principle that it’s better for
company management to exploit finance market inefficiencies to yield profit today at the expense of the investors and bond holders caught holding the bag tomorrow.
