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San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

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Re: San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

#51

Post by gruez »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #47
gruez wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Your local water monopoly has perfected price discrimination. Since water is a necessity, the water monopoly sets the price of water to "everything you own". This says more about monopoly power abuse than problems with "price discrimination". Food is also essential, yet prices don't rise to "everything you own" (even for the poorest) because of competition.

That's called "the consumer price surplus". It's one of the major reasons that market economies are better for everyone than command economies. And it's the antithesis of price discrimination. You're right about monopolies -- price discrimination is a symptom of monopolistic pricing powers. It's not that price discrimination should be illegal, it's that successful price discrimination is a strong symbol of monopoly,…

>That's called "the consumer price surplus". It's one of the major reasons that market economies are better for everyone than command economies. And it's the antithesis of price discrimination.

I'm not denying this exists, just pointing out your Reductio ad absurdum is absurd and fails rhetorically. If your point is that without surveillance pricing legislation, people selling us essentials will milk us for the last dime we have, that simply isn't happening today.

> It's not that price discrimination should be illegal, it's that successful price discrimination is a strong symbol of monopoly

This isn't obviously true. For instance, airlines engages in intense price discrimination, with different fare classes, discounts, and changing princes per day, yet the industry has famously poor margins - the exact opposite of a monopoly. Same for games and movies (they get heavily discounted after release), and while you can argue the copyright system gives them a monopoly, it's only on that particular work. There are plenty of other games or movies to choose from.

Re: San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

#52

Post by pessimizer »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #8
b345 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is because you're on the side benefitting from it. It doesn't benefit the consumer or the working class.

> It doesn't benefit the consumer or the working class It should absolutely benefit the blue-collar consumer. Whom it hurts is the moderately rich. (If it works as intended.)

I don't think this makes any sense. If this were true, payday loans would be the lowest interest loans, and ghetto grocery stores would have the lowest prices.

The more money you have, the less desperate you are, the longer you can wait to make a purchase, and the more storage space and capital you have to enable you to get the ideal price/unit bulk rate. I don't think surveillance pricing will affect the moderately rich at all. It will only target the poor.

They will know that you have no bread left in the pantry, no car, two children and no other grocery store near you, and you will pay convenience store prices.

edit: Hell, they'll know that you have $10 left, so you can afford it. They'll know you have a history of taking payday loans when desperate, so they'll raise the price even when you can't afford it, and sell your identity to a payday loan company. The payday loan company will pay a bigger premium for you because they know you have a propensity to default.

Re: San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

#53

Post by Eisenstein »

gruez wrote: post #41
Eisenstein wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are saying is that the amount of money people save getting discounts is made up by increases to the retail price for everyone else, and that this is equal to the extra money that individually priced people would pay or receive or discounts, so its a wash? This assumes that the business would raise prices to make more money from people who they think can pay it and give that back to others as a discount. Do y…

>This assumes that the business would raise prices to make more money from people who they think can pay it and give that back to others as a discount. >Do you have evidence this would be the case? This is pretty standard economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

1. That didn't answer my question

2. Do you have evidence that the we are operating under standard economics when massive personalized data collection is being used in conjunction with AI to individualize pricing per consumer instead of per market segment?

Re: San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

#54

Post by fluoridation »

cameldrv wrote: post #42
pydry wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price discrimination isn't about wealth. A poor person who books a flight the day before because of an emergency pays more than a rich person who books it 3 months out. Pharmaceuticals lobbying hard to get the UK to stop buying drugs on the national level (where they have enormous pricing power) and make hospitals responsible for buying drugs. This would be terrible for the UK.

For airline tickets, it's mostly not about wealth yet, at least on U.S. domestic routes. I know that for some international tickets, especially between a rich country and a poor country, the price can be different depending on whether you are buying in the currency of the rich country or the poor country, and I think, if it's a round trip, whether it's originating in the rich country or the poor country. You really s…

>You can push the button that says "Show Less" or "Not Interested", but they generally don't care. What works is when they show you something you don't like is to close the app and do something else. That is a signal that they respect.

I just added a rule to uBP to delete the element from the DOM.

Re: San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

#55

Post by gruez »

stillwaitingla wrote: post #24
dynm wrote: post #11

Like most people, surveillance pricing feels gross to me. But I think we need to separate two things: Surveillance pricing is a combination of (a) price discrimination and (b) surveillance. If it were up to me, I'd probably give people much stronger legal rights to control their personal information, which would in turn decrease "surveillance". But I haven't seen a convincing argument to ban price discrimination. The…

> But I haven't seen a convincing argument to ban price discrimination. The very definition of "price discrimination" is the convincing argument. "How much does this candy bar cost?" "Well, you social credit profile says you payed $700 for pair of shoes last week so... twelve grand." "But the guy in front of me just paid 35 cents for the same candy bar." "Well, I mean, *he* is white." Meanwhile, dynm: > But where's t…

>The very definition of "price discrimination" is the convincing argument.

>...

Your inflammatory wording is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Remove that and it seems far more acceptable

    "How much does this candy bar cost?"
    "$3"
    "But the guy in front of me just paid $1 for the same candy bar."
    "He's rewards club member so he pays the members' price of $2, then used a $1 off coupon on top"

Re: San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

#56

Post by gruez »

toss1 wrote: post #28
dynm wrote: post #11

Like most people, surveillance pricing feels gross to me. But I think we need to separate two things: Surveillance pricing is a combination of (a) price discrimination and (b) surveillance. If it were up to me, I'd probably give people much stronger legal rights to control their personal information, which would in turn decrease "surveillance". But I haven't seen a convincing argument to ban price discrimination. The…

Simple There are two ways to legally "earn" money. The first is to provide a product or service that is sufficiently valuable the buyer willingly parts with the money for the price. The other is extractive — to find a way to exploit the customer with limited choices and extract the maximum value from them. Monopoly pricing is the primary example — people need electricity, housing, food, etc. and if someone corners th…

>A society that permits surveillance pricing will inevitably become more impoverished because the few players doing surveillance pricing will extract more money from the society WITHOUT creating any more value. This impairs everyone else's ability to provide value.

Why can't it be both? SpaceX created starlink, which I don't think anyone doubts is "a product or service that is sufficiently valuable the buyer willingly parts with the money for the price". Yet at the same time it engages in price discrimination. They have different service tiers with various restrictions placed on them. For instance, the cheapest tier costs $55 but must be stationary. The unlimited aviation tier costs $200k[1] but works on a plane. While I'm sure there's some cost differences between serving the first plan vs the second, it's pretty clear there's some discrimination going on. Does that SpaceX is "extracting more money from the society WITHOUT creating any more value"? Would society be better off if starlink was forced to charge one price?

[1] https://www.corporatejetinvestor.com/news/starlink-price-ris...

Re: San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

#57

Post by m4ck_ »

gruez wrote: post #45
m4ck_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I negotiate with a minimum wage cashier, self-checkout, or a checkout page? Have you ever been in a Kroger property, or Walmart, or any other multi-billion dollar retailer and negotiated on something? Maybe they'll price match and I guess that counts, but it's not as if we have access to data to do that in a meaningful way to compete with the data that they have to act on. In lieu of suppressing surveillance p…

>How do I negotiate with a minimum wage cashier, self-checkout, or a checkout page? You "negotiate" by switching to a competitor, or in some circumstances refusing to purchase at all. It's a "negotiation" in the same way that participating in an auction is a negotiation.

I'm sure that's the econ 101 answer for healthy, theoretical free markets. In reality, we have market consolidation leading to near monopolies, collusion/price fixing between what few companies remain, etc. Refusing to purchase works for some things maybe, not so much for basic household goods and groceries, an area where a small handful of companies control the overwhelming majority of the market. Allowing survellience pricing just gives these conglomerates more leverage over consumers.

Re: San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

#58

Post by tavavex »

gruez wrote: post #55
stillwaitingla wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I haven't seen a convincing argument to ban price discrimination. The very definition of "price discrimination" is the convincing argument. "How much does this candy bar cost?" "Well, you social credit profile says you payed $700 for pair of shoes last week so... twelve grand." "But the guy in front of me just paid 35 cents for the same candy bar." "Well, I mean, *he* is white." Meanwhile, dynm: > But where's t…

>The very definition of "price discrimination" is the convincing argument. >... Your inflammatory wording is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Remove that and it seems far more acceptable "How much does this candy bar cost?" "$3" "But the guy in front of me just paid $1 for the same candy bar." "He's rewards club member so he pays the members' price of $2, then used a $1 off coupon on top"

You didn't remove the inflammatory wording, you quietly swapped their argument for a completely different one.

Coupons are not the same as surveillance pricing, because coupons only adjust the price down. They're the way manufacturers get people to try products they wouldn't have bought otherwise. Very importantly, coupons are used by very few people, most still pay the retail price, which forces that price to still remain competitive. Also, anyone can choose to use or not to use coupons. Surveillance pricing is a mandatory price cut or hike that's assigned to you personally by seeing how desperately you want an item and how much you can afford to pay. It's just abusing your customers for the last scraps of cash they have left in exchange for the same product.

Member-only prices are closer to surveillance prices because they make you trade away your purchasing and location data, or even enter some kind of a financial contract with the company, in exchange for a lower price. But it's still nowhere as evil because most people still pay the normal retail price, so the difference between the two prices can't be too disconnected from reality, and because the hoops they make you jump through are still technically free, so it's not dependent on your ability to pay.

Re: San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

#59

Post by robrtsql »

pc86 wrote: post #19
robrtsql wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they're all discounts, for starters. Surveillance pricing defenders claim that surveillance pricing is better because it works both ways--it might offer a higher price to someone who is desperate, but someone who is likely not that motivated might get a sweet deal. I highly doubt that. A highly-advertised, transparent discount or sale is how you sell to someone who is not that motivated. Surveillance pricing is…

> Well, they're all discounts, for starters. And they're subsidized by the revenue made by everyone else. A thousands of coupons start rolling in and meaningfully affecting revenue either the coupons go away or the MSRP increases. It's the exact same pig just slightly different lipstick.

I think I'm more OK with it if the price segmentation happens based on the amount of effort the consumer is willing to put in. I'm much less OK with it if price segmentation happens based on demographics, especially immutable ones.

Re: San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

#60

Post by lux-lux-lux »

stronglikedan wrote: post #33
tekno45 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take control of medicine away from private interests.

And give it to who, governments? The ones that can't even get universal healthcare right anywhere it's been implemented?

That’s…the exact opposite of what the data says?
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