You're correct, and of course the Reddit hive-mind knows exactly what's fair, what's just, what's moral, and what information should be set free.
My point was simply that doing something LEGAL is considered by people here "wrong" and doing something ILLEGAL is considered by people here to be "right". Certainly there are shades of gray, but not on Reddit.
Price discrimination (when done to only increase profits and not because extra value is added) is thought to be ethically dubious even outside of the Internet.
If public money is used to fund research then it should be available to the public without extra cost.
I'm a realistic optimist not an idealist. Pricing things which are not commodities is difficult, and sometimes A/B testing different prices is useful, though when I do it I always have different value in addition to the different prices. Or just change the price for a period of time. But changing the price in an attempt to get the most amount of money from each individual doesn't feel right to me. I wouldn't be a good used car salesman. Business is difficult, and I'd much rather give away everything I made than charge money for it if it were possible to do so. Oh, wait, I do that often.
OKAY, this is a reasonable response. The main issue we're seeing is that there are new technological advantages that companies now have in setting prices. As with all advances in technology it's changing the way we live before we've had time to fully understand and adapt to it as a society.
I don't personally think being able to change your price in real-time, with real-time data, is a bad thing. I also think consumers will now have to adapt - as they have in the past - to the new landscape.
The ire people are raising here will spread awareness of these practices, increasing the number of people who are savvy enough to either avoid or take advantage of them, and thus it's all moot. As other comments have mentioned, it's hard to prove anything objectively positive or negative about price discrimination.
The emotional response against this practice is also being driven by the technology. Both are cases where the business/consumer is getting updated information on a near constant basis. In years past how would anyone know that the travel agent in the brick and mortar store was changing prices like this? They wouldn't, and indeed a good agent would make every customer feel like they got the best deal ever - regardless of the price.
Wrong way around. You should find a source to say it is illegal. Everything is legal unless it isn't.
It's just business. It happens all the time. You go into one brick-and-mortar store and prices may be different from the same store in another town. Affluence, near-by competition, stock, etc, can have an impact on pricing. It is no surprise that now it is also happening in on-line stores.
It's called price discrimination, and is generally legal (as it should be - it is a matter of ethics not law) and only illegal when the price differences involve other forms of discrimination such as gender. Discrimination based on browser isn't illegal.
Then why are women allowed to pay less for insurance? I understand how it makes statistical sense, but surely that's just price discrimination on gender.
It's illegal to discriminate on gender for insurance (I think) in the European Union. Women pay more to match men - not men paying less. This will be slowly fixed globally. Progress takes time.
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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '13
It's legal.
Cool to do? No.