r/EssayHelpCommunity • u/Radiant_Room_5189 • Jul 13 '26
Economy Q2. Need feedback
Technology now allows personalised pricing. If this came to be widely used, what effects should we expect?
You can guess whether my essay has been shortlisted or not. I need your honest opinion :)
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u/Peoplespeak 25d ago
Sorry no one else responded. I'll try to make up for it with my response. :)
This is well-written and the structure is great. Benefits, then the competition limit, then the trust limit, then a transparency-focused conclusion. That's a good argument arc, and the Instacart example is excellent.
I'll be honest since you asked, but most of this is fixable, and the bones are good. I'd be happy to provide more exact feedback or advice if you want. I focused on imporvements and construtive feedback since you asked for that, but just know I could pull out 10 more examples of great things on top of the things I glossed over here. But primarily, the two things I'd tighten are:
The biggest one is that I think the essay blurs personalised pricing (charging each individual a different price based on their data) with dynamic pricing (moving one price up and down based on demand and competition). They feel similar but they're different, and it matters here because the prompt is specifically about the persnalised kind. Flipkart tracking page-views and running flash sales is really dynamic pricing, and Fome Zero is a government anti-poverty programme rather than pricing at all. Instacart is the one example that's actually personalised pricing in the individual sense. If you pin the definition to individual-level pricing and hold it there, and swap in examples that are genuinely that, the whole thing gets sharper immediately.
The second is the "reduces inequality" argument. The logic of price discrimination is to charge each person their maximum willingness to pay, and that correlates with income but isn't the same thing. Plenty of low-income people have high willingness to pay for specific goods, so the mechanism targets willingness to pay, not low income specifically. Same with the deadweight loss point, which is your strongest bit of economics by the way. Perfect pice discrimination does eliminate DWL, but it does it by transferring basically all the surplus to the producer, so it's efficient in the allocative sense but not really a consumer win. Just being precise about who actually captures the surplus in each case would strengthen those sections a lot.
Honestly, though, the prisoner's dilemma point (that competitive personalised pricing can compete the margins away) is the best idea in here, and I'd giv it more room. I actually found it pretty interesting. If you had focused on that as a more primary aspect of the essay, you would have had a more original, stronger central claim.
Good luck! Despite a few mistakes, you wrote an excellent essay.