https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-04-one-person-one-price/
Umm actually basically. Race, gender, location, and age probably play a large role in the models.
Yeah, but a rational business would give minorities lower prices because they're generally poorer, which is absolutely the opposite of what's going to happen.
(A year from now, a report comes out proving that the algo is racist)
But I was told computers can't be racist
this will certainly not lead to an ecosystem of algo-driven haggle-bots eternally trying to squeeze out enough arbitrage to pay the electricity bills
but buying and reselling to each other over and over again will increase gdp like never before! we'll all be rich!but buying and reselling to each other over and over again will increase gdp like never before! we'll all be rich!
Welcome to the Canadian housing market. Seriously.
Personalised pricing is so funny. People would very very rapidly realise that you pay less if you're less domesticated and start training themselves to be less domesticated to corporations.
It is literally the worst idea they've ever had. It will actively provide a monetary incentive for consumers to train themselves out of being cucked by consumerism.
You're not thinking insidiously enough. It'll be an excuse to raise prices across the board and then provide incentives for constant consumers that return prices to a lower, but still higher than now, point. Instead of a cold and calculating "someone making 3x as much will eagerly spend 50% more on this without thinking about it" plan it'll be "everyone pays 50% more, but good corporate paypigs get a 25% discount off of that, and if their loyalty credit score with the vendor is high enough it'll be 35%!" incentivizing both consumption and subservience while extracting more profit off of fewer commodities.
It'll be the evolution of existing "loyalty programs" and the like, not the sorts of weird idealist "market efficiency" thought experiments the high priests of capital think up when swimming in numbers and models built on flawed and nonsensical foundations. Because as everyone quickly sees, this whole concept is nonsense that implodes from outrage or gets gamed immediately - it only works in on a small scale with passive participants who don't share information or know it's happening. But the sorts of infrastructure the concept requires can easily be used the same way as existing manipulation tactics, just amplified to their logical conclusions.
Libs: Well, joke's on you, a 35% discount after a 50% price hike is actually a 2% decrease in cost!"
Right? It's really weird, the natural outcome of this is that people least likely to pay high prices get better offers. So the best way to get better prices will be to deprogram yourself of every bit of consumerism.
What this will look like in practice would be a little different to what I'm saying but the outcome would be the same. People would become less housebroken.
We can disguise ourselves in the crowd of people trying to make themselves look like communists to get better prices
Capitalists taking us back to the barter system but they can't get it right because they don't understand the progression to MCM'. A generation of people bought up on Hollywood economics trying to put Hollywood economics into practice.
Remember when capitalists thought the Internet was going to completely kill exploitative pricing for low information customers? I hate it here.
how the fuck would that even work lol
literal physical price tag in physical store
neolibs: "uhhh the internet is gonna make this even more consistent, somehow"
other neolibs: "uhhh the internet will never be more important than a fucking fax machine"seriously why are neolibs so fucking moronic. I can understand lying for your own benefit but several of these dumbasses ruined their reputations due to being high on their own supply
Everyone thought the internet would make information more accessible and therefore people would be more informed but what it really does is make such an abundance of information accessible that is untrue that people are now less informed.
With that said it's also producing places like this one so we'll see just how that plays out into the future I guess.
I always look up prices for more expensive things when I'm in a store and will buy them online if they're cheaper.
see this is how we get communism everyone pays different amounts but ends up with the same stuff
if you make $1000 a year iphone costs $1 and if you make $1000000 iphone costs $1000 that's communism
i will not be taking questions. checkmate hexbear
This is going to cause tension between the explicit ideology of the bourgeoisie (can make more money by giving poor people better deals) and their actual internalized ideology (lazy poors deserve nothing and should pay ever more). Which I think is neat.
(I don't actually expect this to be deployed though, it's way easier to sell a surveillance based price gauging system to a big company than it is to actually build it.)
I think functionally all the pieces are there (caveat: they're shitty). Pricing is already done this was, except on a regional level. Digital ad buys are done at the demographic/behavioural level. The obvious issues are: fairness perception - consumers tend not to trust companies which may not let them have the best available offer, and data trust - businesses already use the demographic/behavioiral data for digital ad buys so they know that the data is shit. Also, the payoff on doing stuff at the individual level versus a statistical level is usually a few percentage points. It's a significant amount for large corporations, but it would also potentially be too much of a risk to implement. Then again losing the trust of your entire customer base for like a marginal revenue boost for 1 quarter is 100% something corporate America would do.
Want to emphasize again that the data that digital ad buys are done on is doodooo.
Except to the people selling the ad space lol. That data is gold to them.
In [bad country] the algorithm determines how much you pay for things based on a social scoring system.
But God forbid we get some progressive fines for when the rich or corporations do something fucked up.
The people programming this shit are mainlining that banality of evil shit.
of course the image has the black man getting his chromosomes analyzed
Literally social credit lol
But it’s not by the sinister Chinese so it’s ok
Well this is disgusting, but at least it looks incredibly easy to game. Lie about your job, make big purchases on weeks you aren't paid, buy generic when possible, trade coupons with friends, spoof GPS and geoIP data to look like you're in a poorer location. And that's just off the top of my head. Once again the big internet money making strategy is taking advantage of the uninformed and the elderly.
So easy to live my life like a refugee from Skynet in order to get 20% cheaper corn pops
Does that matter? Your ability to game an only roughly accurate algorithm only indicates that the value of your time is less than other potential buyers. They'll be happy to let you pay less, as they're making a killing selling to uninformed or lazier people who have inelastic demand.
It does matter because:
-
it makes my brain happy to come up with ways to beat it
-
beating the algorithm will reduce prices for the shopper (loss leaders will be used heavily for this I'm sure)
-
if enough people are cheating the system, it breaks the algorithm for everyone
I dunno. I have access to nearly every piece of digital media ever created and I pay no one, and yet, everyone else goes throughout the world and pays oodles on monthly services, all to avoid the "cost" of learning what soulseek is, what mutorrent is.
I guess I didn't read your final sentence in your OP, and maybe we're saying the same thing, but this just doesn't need to matter to most people here-- but yes, it continues as a means to squeeze money from the unresourceful.
-
Women with a time machine take note: "John Wanamaker opened his flagship department store in an abandoned railroad depot in Philadelphia in 1876 with a novel idea: affixing a price tag to each item"
but for prices?
