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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

#71

Post by toss1 »

gruez wrote: post #56
toss1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 willingl…

Good distinction! Varying service tiers are different from surveillance price discrimination.

It is not a difference for each person; it is a difference for a different category or type of person or service.

It is not exploiting spying on a person's private life and seeing when they are desperate or get the DGAF discount.

The SpaceX stationary/mobile distinction actually provides a better service - for more money, you get to move around. I'm not sure if it puts any higher load on the system but my guess would be the excess profit exceeds the extra cost of tracking a mobile terminal.

They aren't great, but are at least fair. Airlines have also been doing it for decades, beyond economy/biz/first but also cheaper if your flight includes a Saturday stayover (extra $$ for typical biz travelers) and far more sophisticated schemes now.

Similar for parking lots charging more per hour during business hours vs nights/weekends.

The key is the category-type prices are not exploiting an unfair advantage by prying into individual customer's private lives.

Is it on a similar (slippery) slope of charging more without providing more value? Sort of. But they really are very different things.

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

#72

Post by zzo38computer »

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…

Different countries use different money, and also if they sell in the place then it can still be a price for the different place, which does not necessarily involve surveillance, nor does it necessarily involve hidden fees, etc.

(If they try to prevent someone from buying them and using them elsewhere or buying one for a specific other person who requested it who they do not know, then that is different, but it might lead to different issues (e.g. liability of tampering with medications, different regulations in different countries, etc).)

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

#73

Post by zzo38computer »

Possibly, to add the anti-discrimination law, one of the other things that is protected against discrimination would be the computers (including kind of computers and lack of computers). Then, they cannot expect you to have a app to get a discount.

Additionally, in situations where it would be reasonable, to publish the catalogs including prices and to allow them to be distributed. (My idea of a computer payment file, additionally requires that the catalog file have a proof of work field.)

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

#74

Post by xhkkffbf »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4
xhkkffbf wrote: post #3

I agree that surveillance pricing sounds terrible and discriminatory. But people are also happy with coupons, codes, introductory pricing, employee discounts and many of the other schemes that do more or less the same thing. One guy who worked for an athletic shoe company told me that they had a special code that their sponsored athletes could give to their friends. In the end, what's the difference?

> what's the difference? For me, it's the surveillance infrastructure per se . My main curiosity around these bills is to what extent surveillance pricing–versus ad targeting–drives the economics of those systems. (My prior is not much.)

You realize that there's plenty of surveillance in the infrastructure that sends coupon codes to some patrons and collates loyalty points, right?

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

#75

Post by TheCoelacanth »

pydry wrote: post #22
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…

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.

Yeah, surveillance pricing might sometimes result in poor people paying less because they care more about low prices, but it can just as easily result in them paying more because they have less economic power.

If we want to subsidize poor people, we should probably just transfer money to them instead of trusting for-profit companies to charge them less.

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

#76

Post by TheCoelacanth »

bobbiechen wrote: post #69

I had an interesting conversation with an coworker recently - If you give an agent a budget of $500 to buy a flight, and the airline knows this and bumps your price to $499 even though it will offer the same flight at $300 to someone else, is there harm done? I argued it feels unjust. He said it's totally fair, it's within budget so what's the problem? Naturally this trends towards a sort of principal-agent problem w…

The problem is that it completely eliminates the consumer surplus from the transaction and converts it to producer surplus. It basically erases all benefits of capitalism for the average person.

If it becomes the norm to charge the maximum that someone is willing to pay in every consumer transaction, then business owners are almost forcing average people to try to end capitalism.

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

#77

Post by therealpygon »

bobbiechen wrote: post #69

I had an interesting conversation with an coworker recently - If you give an agent a budget of $500 to buy a flight, and the airline knows this and bumps your price to $499 even though it will offer the same flight at $300 to someone else, is there harm done? I argued it feels unjust. He said it's totally fair, it's within budget so what's the problem? Naturally this trends towards a sort of principal-agent problem w…

I’d ask that coworker, “so you would be okay with paying $10 per gallon of gas, while the Prius that barely uses gas next to you pays only $3 per gallon? You use more gas, which means it is in your budget to afford, right?” (Or pick another alternative that is applicable.)

Inverting the argument almost always exposes cracks, because they will immediately switch to why it’s not the same.

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

#78

Post by inigyou »

Schiendelman wrote: post #65
pc86 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's entirely possible that some kind of "coarse" price discrimination is OK/good but "fine-grained" price discrimination is bad. But where's the argument? This seems entirely reasonable - they're obviously a point where tax rates are too low and revenue isn't being brought in, but also a point where tax rates are too high, incentivizing tax shelters or outright crime, and revenue starts decreasing again. The price…

It's not necessarily obvious that tax rates can be too low. If you're a government and you issue the currency, you can get much of the same outcome as taxation by printing the money you need to spend. What you don't get by doing that is natural redistribution the way graduated marginal rates give you. You have to spend to redistribute.

You get too much inflation that way. Taxation is a mechanism of destroying currency to cause deflation to offset the inflation caused by government spending.

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

#79

Post by inigyou »

pc86 wrote: post #16
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…

> It's entirely possible that some kind of "coarse" price discrimination is OK/good but "fine-grained" price discrimination is bad. But where's the argument? This seems entirely reasonable - they're obviously a point where tax rates are too low and revenue isn't being brought in, but also a point where tax rates are too high, incentivizing tax shelters or outright crime, and revenue starts decreasing again. The price…

For some reason things that are considered bad for the government to do are considered fine for corporations to do more. Rent is a tax.

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

#80

Post by inigyou »

tavavex wrote: post #58
gruez wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

More relevantly, someone who sees $70 for a chocolate bar and has a $69 off coupon probably won't be back to "that store with the stupid prices."
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