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Nostr.

128 comments

  • In a past life I wrote the software that did this.

    It’s not just about charging more when you’re desperate. It’s also things like charging you less to keep you addicted, or getting you hooked. Exploiting your emotions and behaviour to make it effective. A small loss on you now could be a long time gain for them.

    Some more scenarios:

    • you’ve decided to quit alcohol. Your social media accounts are used to identify you’re looking for advice. They advertise more, and send you heavy, heavy discounts a few days in to keep you on the wagon.
    • Your cars insurance tracker has picked up your erratic driving. Your phone has tracked more forceful interactions, your works email provider has revealed you’ve been in a minimum of three meetings all day; You’re having a shit, stressful, day. They can’t give you discounts on your cigarettes but they do know they can get you to buy two packs instead of one by serving you ads that suggest stock levels are low. You buy two and chain smoke all day, your daily average goes from 0.5 to 0.7 packs a day.
    • You go to a chain restaurant often. They know they can get you to buy more in the long run if they increase the volume you eat gradually. Every visit they goad you into buying more. Didn’t do it last time? Steeper discounts next time. Until one day you buy the extra side. That’s now your new baseline. A few weeks of that and back onto the stair climb. A little by little. You’re spending more and more.
    • you’re on holiday. everyone knows you’re not coming back anytime soon so they charge full price. But move to a new city? Everyone has discounts for you to get you in the door.

    The data available back then was pretty minimal, effectively only the data we generated. But it was still enough to prey on your lizard brain. With data brokerage I’ve got no idea what level of evils we could have done.

  • Okay so fast-forward ten two more years beyond that (it doesn't matter how much - all of this is already in the past anyway:-P): virtually everyone (from your area) has an internet presence. But for you, all "they" see is a tiny stream of encrypted traffic to servers outside of your home country. Or maybe a large stream, whatever - are you downloading child pornography perhaps? Or are you a terrorist, trying to evade detection by the "legitimate" establishment, who is simply trying to "help" you to set the price for fixing your laptop?

    Bam, they charge you the maximum amount for the repair anyway, then tack on a fee for the extra effort involved in having to investigate you further, making the final price double what it would have been. And this happens for every single item you buy, plus you cannot get a job b/c you don't have a FacedInLinkThread account. The best sheeples get the best pricing structures...

    This isn't something that individuals can fight easily, without a rather extreme amount of effort involved. Hence we should fight it together.

    • Fast food joints already offer lower prices in their apps than at the drive through. You pay the difference through all the data they harvest.

      • Yes I have an order ready for a "None-ya", is there a "None-ya" here? Is anyone here named "None-ya bidness"?

        It's a damnable choice, that's for sure. Let them see literally everything that you do - in the sense of every single app that you have installed on that same machine - or else pay the extra price. Ngl, depending on how often I visit each place, I've gone both ways on this. Also, rather than recall a unique password for every site that is accessible from your mobile and potentially synched with a desktop, if you log in using a Play/Google or App/Apple account, then they have that link too - it's just so convenient though!

        It used to be email addresses. Now that still happens, but the ratchet has moved up to include phones. This is why I refuse to put banking apps onto any mobile devices - they are not "computers", nor are they "yours", most often even when rooted & with the OS replaced, b/c of the corruption that Google has introduced into the core Android OS.

        But... what else can we do, other than choose which manner of payment we will offer the wolves? Even if that is only in terms of our efforts, time, and attention spans (and possibly the cost of a 2nd phone or at least SIM:-P) - they manage to define so many of our actions even if only in the negative sense of what we rail against. That part is inevitable, so the only question remaining is how much do we give in.

      • I've only ever seen higher prices in apps

  • I'm going to engineer an llm which continuously complains on social media that I don't have enough money to buy a new laptop until it drops below x price

  • The economics term for this is price discrimination. Nothing to do with racial discrimination, it's discriminating based on willingness to pay.

    But usually it's not done by raising the prices above normal it's done by setting the regular prices higher and then offering a discount to people who aren't willing to pay less. People tend not to get upset when it's done that way. Student discount at the movie theater is a form of price discrimination. People accept it because they're being nice to people that don't have a lot of money. Seniors discount? Also being nice, I guess. But the reality is they know everyone else is willing to pay more so they charge more.

    And this has already been happening online. About a decade ago I noticed what when I searched for flights from an airline then went to facebook, I'd get an ad from that airline offering a discount. Not as sophisticated as attempting to determining the exact price I was willing to pay, but it's along the same lines.

    But the problems with these schemes is that people quickly figure out the system. I just made it a habit to search for a flight, then go onto facebook to look for the discount even when I'd be willing to pay even if there was no discount. But why not trick the system into thinking I didn't really care about booking the flight and get that discount?

  • This is only a problem if the service provider is a monopoly (or if every service provider illegally coordinates price fixing).

    I might be willing to pay up to $800 to fix a $1000 computer (a more expensive repair might cause me to look to buy a replacement rather than repairing). But if it's a 1 hour job requiring $100 of parts, then all the computer repair shops would be competing with each other for my business, essentially setting their hourly rate for their labor. At that point it's like bidding at auction up to a certain point, but expecting to still pay the lowest available price.

    So the problem isn't necessarily perfect pricing information from the other side, but lack of competition for pricing from the other side. We should be fighting to break up monopolies and punishing illegal price fixing.

    • You don’t need a monopoly for this to be a problem.

      Databrokers can offer data sets of “customer price elasticity”. Tables of “how much we think X would spend on these generic item categories”. Eg “booly would pay $15 for a burger, vs $10 average”

      Point of Sale systems could start offering integrations to these data sets.

      All shops have to do now is set a list price, a minimum price, a category, and leave it up to the PoS to (not) give discounts.

      You want a burger, you’re fed a single-use short lived discount “$5 off a $20 burger. Today only” While someone else gets “buy one get one free”.

      It’s then a ‘fair’ market. Shops have and ‘compete’ with their (high) list prices, data brokers compete with “excess profit” statistics (ie, how much more money above the minimum price they made). Nobody is colluding, they’re just basing discounts off external arbitrary signals.

      It slowly becomes the norm to get just-in-time discounts, and the consumer gets shafted. If you’re not in the system, you’re paying more than everyone else.

      (And all of this has been happening in some markets for over a decade)

      • This framework you describe is still grounded in a large number of producers intentionally avoiding undercutting the competition in price.

        If a profit can be made selling burgers for $10, and literally every burger seller knows that I'm happy paying $15 for a burger, they still have to compete with each other to get my business. Am I going to choose the place that charges everyone $10, or the place that I know engages in opaque pricing and is offering me $15? The most sophisticated price discrimination algorithm in the world doesnt do any good if the other burger shops don't play along.

        And this plays out every day in places like airports. Yes, I know I just need to eat before I jump on my connecting flight, and I'm not super price sensitive in that situation. But I won't go to the place that's far and away more expensive than another, or who I just recently read about on some travel blog as a price gouger.

        And for a more concrete example of something that happens today, with services that are worth a completely different price than what it costs to provide it, and where everyone knows the buyer is valuing the service at that high value. Say I have an unfinished basement, and I want to hire a contractor to finish it with drywall, paint, flooring, HVAC, etc. It's obvious to everyone how much that project adds to the livable square footage, and plenty of public valuation models show exactly how much that job adds to the value of the home. And everyone knows I'm about to list the home afterward for sale. But if 10 contractors are competing for the job, they don't really care what value it provides to me if I choose not to hire them, so they're bidding prices that cover the level of profit they want to make on the job, while not ceding the price advantage to the competition. The presence of competition tempers the price gouging.

        So I still think competition is the key policy to pursue. Competition solves the problem being described here, and any market with this kind of individualized price gouging is suffering from insufficient competition.

  • Meanwhile I just noticed that my mobile provider (Congstar Germany) will be completely phasing out their online customer center in favor of their app. They already removed functionality from the site, like seeing how much data you have used this month. Why? The answer is in their huge list of third-party cookies I assume.

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