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Comment by Legend2440 | Hacker News Reader

>It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.

Not necessarily. Look at airlines for example, which make heavy use of price discrimination. This allows them to offer a lower economy price to people who have less money, while subsidizing the flight by charging a higher price to business or luxury travelers.

If they were only allowed to offer one type of ticket at one price, it would mostly benefit richer passengers while pricing the poorest passengers out of air travel.

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Stores already have that in the form of having cheaper and more expensive products in the same category (for example, 5 different brands of tomato sauce).

The practice that needs to be outlawed is invisible and per customer pricing. It would be the airline for the same class of seat charging different amounts because, for example, their profile of the flier shows they recently searched for "casket" and so they are likely heading to a family funeral.

It would be as if the airline for their economy class offered the flight for $1000 if you don't play, $600 to attract customers into buying, and $800 if they find their customer is desperate. All for the same seat.

They already do charge different prices for the same seat, based on their assessment of the type of passenger you are.

You've picked an "evil" example, but what price discrimination really tends to look like is charging richer people more.

Prices are generally lowered for poor people because they'd rather have your $300 than have an empty seat. If you don't have $800, no amount of desperation will make you pay it - you'll just miss the funeral.

The counter example are “dollar stores”, that offer lower per-package pricing at much higher per-unit prices.

> [Airlines] already do charge different prices for the same seat, based on their assessment of the type of passenger you are.

That has been often accused, but not proved (at least in the US).

Nobody is saying you can’t have different classes of service or product offerings. But if I’m buying a banana or you’re buying it, it’s the still a banana.

Different air travelers can pay very different prices for the same seat.

Airlines can't directly tell how much money a customer has, so they find indirect proxies.

Business travelers (reimbursed by their employer and thus not very price-sensitive) have identifiable patterns. They prefer particular flights on particular days of the week, tend to buy tickets close to date of travel, etc. Airlines exploit this to charge them higher prices.

If two consumers purchase the same item at the same time, it should be the same price. That's what we're debating. If an airline raises prices closer to departure, then that's not a violation of privacy, nor discriminatory in the sense we're discussing here.

I do, however, object to firms aggregating any individual's purchases across different interactions. That data should belong solely to the individual and it should be illegal to retain enough information to aggregate interactions across interactions with the same customer.

There's no subsidizing in your described arrangement unless people who have less money get it below cost.

> If they were only allowed to offer one type of ticket at one price, it would mostly benefit richer passengers while pricing the poorest passengers out of air travel.

I'm sold, how do we put this in the Constitution?

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