https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-04-one-person-one-price/

  • Owl [he/him]
    ·
    5 months ago

    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.)

    • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      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.