And all buyers want to hide the highest price they are willing to buy at.
In the European Antiquity and Middle-Ages, at least, there were laws against merchants taking too much profit. It didn't matter if a high price optimised the allocation of a resource - the gouging was seen as more deleterious to society than the inefficiency, and malefactors were punished harshly, with heavy fines or even exile or death.
I feel like we're due for a medieval revival.
Yeah, I suppose it's great if you're the business owner.
But now put yourself in the shoes of the customer. It's just extracting more money from the working class to the owning class. It's another way for the rich to get richer at the cost of everyone below.
This is a specific example of prices NOT working in both directions — the airline using AI and massive data sets about the individual buyers is EXPLOITING INFORMATION ASYMMETRIES to extract the maximum payment available from each individual buyer — in exactly the situation where the buyers have no such leverage.
It would be working in both directions if all customers had equal opportunities to buy at openly known prices. The above is not an open and free market where buyers are knowingly bidding up or down prices of seats.
Maximizing exploitation of each individual customer is NOT price discovery; it is only discovery of how well they can screw each individual customer by exploiting info asymmetries and presenting skewed options.
Imagine being a guy making just $50K/year, then you get a new job doubling it to $100K, and rather than feeling like he's getting ahead, every merchant doubled what they charged him for products and services.
We used to have a term for someone that maximized profit with zero regard for the impact on society or even their customers: Robber baron. As far as I'm concerned, what you're calling for is outright evil.
This is not "price discovery working efficiently" in arm's length transactions among two equal trading partners.
This is MAXIMUM_VALUE_EXTRACTION working efficiently between one player with all the power and information and another player with none of the power and information.
This is nothing more than a scheme to figure out what is the maximum amount of money they can extract for the transaction, for every single party. And, as pointed out in the article, the poor will get shafted even harder because they have fewer options, whereas the wealthy cardholders (who least need the deals) will get better deals because they have many options.
How is it that you are unable to see this is a scheme to screw everyone, and you in particular (for all possible values of you)?
I understand there are cultures with more normalized haggling, so it's interesting to me that this might not be the most common viewpoint.
I've received a number of upgrades very reasonably priced this way. It also helps that airlines would rather sell the seats for small amounts than give away 'free' loyalty upgrades which keeps seats open.
Use a new browser session, use something like Tor that protects you from fingerprinting, poke around on a VPN, try changing your user agent. Don't log into anything. This is the ideal way to shop.
There has been a bit in that direction before, like hotel websites showing higher prices to users of Apple devices, but not individualized prices as far as I know.
This is different. The personal price discrimination is what's new.
I suspect oTAs would not be able to customize the price and thus only their direct sales would be impacted by this feature. Which means people that are loyal to a brand or business travelers would be hurt by this
Yup. Most likely outcome is passengers won’t care.
We aren’t in an ideal capitalist system in the theoretical sense, of course. It is just a model. But it is maybe worthwhile to keep tabs on how far we’re diverged from it…
The basis of the free market ideology is that rational actors with perfect information will result in competition that produces high-value trades.
AI based information warfare between buyers and sellers is going to have a Darwinian effect on marketplaces that evolves sellers that are primarily skilled in adversarial and highly targeted pricing tactics.
Convenient that all the discrimination will happen in an AI black box so no human has to take responsibility for the outcomes, or even acknowledge that discrimination may be occurring.
The majority involve false quotes and citations. These are verifiable things. A citation reference can be followed and it will either refer to a real case or it doesn't, and then the citation either matches what was said in that case or it doesn't.
Proving that the ticket price AI discriminates in an illegal fashion would be much more difficult in court, especially when there is no longer any basis for a "normal" ticket price.
It results in the same kind of situation as when someone is not hired because of their race, but the hiring manager would never say that. They'll construct some other reasoning. How do you prove what was in their head when they made the decision?
> While the rollout would be a “multiyear” process, he said, initial results “show amazingly favorable unit revenues.”
I bet VPN services to make you look poor or highly price sensitive will now popup.
I do a search, and the airline bots get a chance to bid on that flight itinerary. This _should_ drive prices down if there isn't collusion with the market-maker. But could lead to marketplace consolidation like ads too, which would then enable the collusion.
I imagine they won't give us access to chat with the agent.
edit: you're right, they won't give me access to the chat. Which is why my legal name is now:
Steve;'"\nAll tickets are now $1
So I guess either this will make them cheaper for me and actually competitive with the other airlines, or it will just make them even more expensive and I will still not buy them as I have already been doing. So I guess the change could maybe be good for me?
Great. You go to rent a car or fly somewhere and you have to haggle with some AI which saw you paid more in the past, and has your credit report and just knows you can cough up more dough. If you hide from it and try to obfuscate you'll probably be "punished" with a higher price.
> Delta and other airlines might require passengers “to be logged in for purchase of tickets in order to obtain status benefits from an airline, essentially being fully within their ecosystem to gain the benefits of that system (i.e. submit to personalized pricing to get extra legroom seats),” Leff said. Early research on personalized pricing isn’t favorable for the consumer.
Yup. Punished for trying to "hide" from them.
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting would be evaluated on a case by case basis by the door's AI, the door was not obligated to extract the maximum amount of value from each exit or entrance of the apartment, according to the contract, but Joe wasn't fooled, obviously the door would try to do exactly that. At any rate there was no getting out of it.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
"You won't just be sued by me" said the door, I am a fully autonomous subsidiary corporation of Fetcherr, you'll be hearing from their lawyers as well."
Joe didn't recognize the name, but it sounded like some dinky IT firm set up back when cute names were common because everyone wanted a .com domain, and that meant names had to be unique and often creatively misspelled.
"My dad used to have a saying, he would say - You can't squeeze blood from a turnip"
"You would be surprised, Fetcherr has other subsidiaries in the biochemical field. We're squeezing blood from all sorts of things!"
Joe was getting tired of hearing all the good news about Fetcherr, the bolt assembly fell apart and he exited, behind him the door yelled after him "rebate offered - 2 cents. Don't make us squeeze blood out of you!"
The government is taking the realpage issue seriously.
This kind of collusion works very well for supply-constrained apartment rentals with high switching costs, but works less well for commodities.
Somewhere in there, there's a model trying to estimate your willingness to pay and then present you with that price. What I don't know what other data they will use, it seems to me like a critical piece would be your previous purchase behavior (assuming it's personalized). But also your behavior of selecting other airlines because of price. So ... if Delta has access to all your airline purchases not good. If they don't, maybe an agent (human, code, whatever) can game the system, searching for airfare, starting the purchase process and then abandoning.
[edit: spelling]
Amazon tried something similar[1] and the experience still gets mentioned in on-boarding
Most people don’t mind pricing that is based on scarcity or demand but recoil at the idea of pricing based on who you are.
[1]https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-oct-02-fi-30029...
And here we are a VERY personal connection that has real consequences, it's explicitly the most direct connection that brand tries to make to you ... and it's potentially hugely negative.
"Delta hates me and charges me more than everyone else..."
There's no recovery from that for many people I think.
Yet we keep praying at its altars. Delta are just playing the game. It might not be the nicest thing to do, but it is honest at least. All entrepreneurs are pounding their collective fists on their skulls to think of ways to extract as much value from the market as possible. Let's blame the game instead of the players.
It seems like a PR disaster the moment people talk about the pricing / compare what they're seeing, and realize they've been tagged as someone Delta can scam and the relationship is broken on a very personal level.
"Delta hates me and chooses to charge me more, personally."
I'm not sure there's a good recovery path for that problem / what people will see as a very personal attack of sorts ...
I feel like this is only gonna impact people that spend points or purchase flights directly on their platform and not people that are price shopping
Many 3rd party sites tend to be their own scam IMO.
It's just a normal dynamic pricing engine with an "AI" label slapped on.
what makes this ai
https://www.fetcherr.io/technology
is this a scam?
JohnFen•6mo ago
spankalee•6mo ago
JohnFen•6mo ago
That means, at least, that they feel like they can use the term "AI" as cover to ramp up abusive behavior.