81–90 of 94 posts
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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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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…
Is it just a matter of the 'turbo' button then? Surveillance pricing could be reframed to be entirely discount based. A banana shall be $10k/unit and then it is discounted either $9999 or $9998 depending on who you are? It seems fairly equivalent. I don't like it either because I don't want the vendor to extract almost all the surplus from the relationship but I suppose I could get that by just settling for fewer thi…
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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.
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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…
This even happens with your own Uber accounts- when I'm logged into my work Uber account the prices are always $5-$25 more expensive but if I toggle to my personal Uber account they drop immediately for the same ride. I asked our work accounting team (with screenshots!) if I could just use the cheaper ride via my personal account and expense it to save the company money and they said no lol.
I know safeway for instance raises prices on just about everything, and to lower them you need to register for a loyalty program by providing personal information "voluntarily".
we should have the ability to say "I decline loyalty program membership" with the same price. (for example maybe by giving 888-888-8888 as a phone number)
this is basically the same thing as surveillance pricing, but you voluntarily tell them yourself.
I suspect part of the reason this is playing well on this website is banning surveillance pricing is great for rich people. I don't have the time or inclination to coupon or aggressively cross-shop but I benefit a lot from the less well-off folks who do. The grocery store, without any ability to differentiate, has to assume that I might be one of those people and sell me a banana at the same price.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I suspect part of the reason this is playing well on this website is banning surveillance pricing is great for rich people. I don't have the time or inclination to coupon or aggressively cross-shop but I benefit a lot from the less well-off folks who do. The grocery store, without any ability to differentiate, has to assume that I might be one of those people and sell me a banana at the same price.
Great for rich people or just not your relative purchasing power being completely eroded. Why work for a 5% raise if it means all your expenses go up 5%?
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 in the name. Does having a Mexican person pay more for taco shells than a Caucasian not immediately ring legal bells?
>Pharmaceuticals are often priced much low in poor countries. That's price discrimination. (You could think of it as a primitive form of surveillance pricing.)
That's not surveillance pricing in the same way that utilizing local cookies isn't personal data farming. It's the first step to a much more nebulous web, but no one is saying that businesses can't price based on the area. It's only when amassing millions of user's data that unexpected trends arise that such data becomes dangerous.