It seems obvious why two people getting the exact same product / service but paying a different amount is a controversial matter. Especially, since the discriminating factor is the fact that you are willing to pay more!
If a vendor wants to price discriminate, there are ways of doing it, such as loyalty programs or rewards, which do not 'offend' the consumer and still manage to capture (most of) the consumer surplus.
In this case though, this is not what Orbitz is doing, they keep the prices constant but show different default options.
Isn't that the right way to do it? If Mac users choose options (a, b, c) the most often then these are the ones that you should default to. And the same for non-Mac users but with frequent options (d, e, f).
And in this case it happens to be that, on average, (a, b, c) have higher prices than (d, e, f).
Let's say Best Buy could magically learn your income and checking account balance when you walked in the door. And just before you walked in, employees rushed and hid all of the lower-priced TVs and computers. How would you feel about that?
It seems obvious why two people getting the exact same product / service but paying a different amount is a controversial matter. Especially, since the discriminating factor is the fact that you are willing to pay more!
If a vendor wants to price discriminate, there are ways of doing it, such as loyalty programs or rewards, which do not 'offend' the consumer and still manage to capture (most of) the consumer surplus.
In this case though, this is not what Orbitz is doing, they keep the prices constant but show different default options.
Isn't that the right way to do it? If Mac users choose options (a, b, c) the most often then these are the ones that you should default to. And the same for non-Mac users but with frequent options (d, e, f).
And in this case it happens to be that, on average, (a, b, c) have higher prices than (d, e, f).