Unless it means companies have to pay more someone else - then they resort to cartels or the like to alter the "free" market - they always turn the table to increse their own profits, taking advantage of asimmetry.

This has nothing to do with supply or demand. Supply isn't changing with this, demand isn't changing, they're just trying to get more money out of whoever is willing to pay more.

So Delta and the ride-hailing companies use surveillance pricing. Guess who's going on my "don't do business with" list.

Absolutely. When customers shop around they're given titles like "rate tarts". But it's ok for corporates to dynamically price based on desperation, like someone needing to get home at night or an emergency trip abroad.

Don't forget more elaborate strategies - like big corporations not paying taxes, the crime goes up, because there is no money for essential services, people spend more time home - doomscroll and then buy more random tat from Amazon and the likes.

Self feeding machine.

Of course at that level, corporations always have brown envelopes ready to be launched at politicians trying to change it.

Perhaps the sentence should end there.

Corporations gets privileges because of their public utility There's a debate to be had about what constitutes "giant", but once corporations are in a position to make decisions about our lives that we wouldn't permit a government to make, then their public utility is only visible in the rear view mirror.

It's basically company scrip with extra steps - the plan is to leave you with at most zero money

The most frustrating part is how short sighted it is. It manages to make such a comfortable way of life obviously and imminently unsustainable. We could all live like medieval kings but some MBAs have decided to give us civil unrest instead

Assuming there aren't a flood of discrimination* cases based on personal pricing (personal gouge rating?) happening, price comparison sites will need to become interactive and offer an escrow service. The best price for $item$ get ordered via 'someone' else signed up to the comparison service. This should not invalidate consumer rights as it's still a person (even if you personally don't know them) placing the order automagically via the service.

To make purchasing flights transparent, airlines will have to be required to publish (literally) 'the next seat on flight 123 will cost £xxx', easily monitored for compliance. Interesting legislation will be needed to prevent personal pricing being included in services such as insurance.

* AI has form for this already

As high as the market can bear and some extra.

What's not to like it?

/sarcasm

It's one thing to charge more money based on actual supply & demand but once you start charging based on "personal characteristics" you have entered into a very grey, possibly illegal realm. The Robinson-Patman Act comes to mind. Not that I would expect the current administration to enforce it.

The AI bit is irrelevant. It merely makes this probably a bit quicker (and more prone to error if other articles on this site about AI are anything to go by). The real issue is that it prevents consumers making an informed choice, which is essential for any defence of capitalism in a democracy.

It is not merely that prices are varied in real time based on both demand and who is buying, nor that the people providing the services (e.g., Uber drivers) are also not receiving the extra, but that this is done secretly. People are not allowed to see what others are charged or paid, presumably because there would be uproar and the companies would be the first news item on the main bulletins for days. EDS used to have a contract clause that made it a dismissible offence to tell a colleague how much you were paid. This seems like a logical extension of their attitude towards customers and staff.

(Where's the 'Capitalist Pig' icon when you need it?)

> The AI bit is irrelevant. It merely makes this probably a bit quicker (and more

costly once the AI hypesters (and their supply chain) start charging realistic prices to their clients, instead of, oooh, running on debt financing of their GPU farms.

But don't worry, the corporations will just pass their sudden increase in costs onto the consumer (except those who con government into "bailing them out of this crisis that nobody could have foreseen").

But if you take away the AI part, isn't this done all freaking time? Okay, maybe not so much in the consumer world, but in business to business kind of industries. Like anything where you see "request a quote" instead of a price list. Having worked in that kind of field a little bit, I don't for a minute believe the price quote you get depends solely on material and labor costs.

Where did congress get this silly idea that it could do that?

Congress will bloody well learn its place and stop trying to add any hurdles - however small they may be - to the operations of its masters/owners.

Sounds like congress needs a good talking down to by its masters and I'm sure it'll get it in the near future.

Note that the bill is moved by two Democrats and no Republicans. That alone is probably enough to ensure it will go nowhere, so the paymasters may not feel they have to break cover for this.

Here in NZ I am quite confident that this would fall very foul of data protection laws. I am, however, much less confident that those laws will be appropriately enforced.

And avoid the Big Corp Supermarkets with their ePaper price tickets.

At least you'll be able to spot when your local shopkeeper is running ahead of you, swapping paper tickets on the shelves, after he spots the platinum card peeking out of your wallet.

"At least you'll be able to spot when your local shopkeeper is running ahead of you, swapping paper tickets on the shelves, after he spots the platinum card peeking out of your wallet."

Always paying with cash means the shopkeeper has no idea who you are and has no way to jack up prices based on what you CAN pay. If you want to pay more, go to Whole Paycheck market and browse the "organic" selections.

The real worrying part is some stores now have electronic pricing displays on the shelves, so AI could identify you and change the price you see and change it again for the "poor" person behind you. I've not seen it in my shop, but I imagine its coming.

This is where being a proven skinflint becomes an advantage: the AI "knows" you won't purchase unless they make a low offer.

Instantly.

The extra threat here is the expansion of when this happens. Anything with a custom quote like plumbing or building work has a “what will this person pay?” approach to pricing. Multiple quotes can mitigate that to some degree.

The approach moving to “anything you buy on the Internet” is a big change.

If a company is using an older, less advanced AI, they'll be fine.

I'm self-employed so what I get paid is what I charge customers. I've spent time sorting out what I need to charge with some input from what other's charge for the same sort of work and that's it. Just about everybody pays the same with a few getting my best pricing for doing more business with me and for how long they've been a client.

When I buy things, I try to keep the process at an arm's length. The other side doesn't know who I am until we've agreed on a sale. Many big ticket items are still advertised at a price so if a vendor hit me with a premium quote thinking I'm a fat target or desperate, they'd be very wrong to even try it.

In a B2B environment, maybe price fixing could happen, but I just don't see it for somebody such as me that isn't shopping online and subject to prices being set based on who I am.

Wages are another issue. If I ever was to work for somebody else again, I'd have a salary figure in my head going into any negotiation. If the company was advertising a bracket lower than my figure, I'd not apply or make sure they'd entertain a higher wage to get me to the interview table. I do get push back from people when I sent out a quote they don't like, With place like Los Angeles looking to make $35/hr the minimum wage for hospitality workers (hotel maids), I'm not that keen to bring decades of experience and thousands of dollars of tools to a job for $17.50/hr after taxes. I've been super busy for the last couple of weeks at $50/hr. (btw, I charge by the job, not by the hour).

Are we supposed to assume that the register is now US only?

FFS, two extra letters in the article title is all it takes.

The article goes on assuming every visitor to the register lives in the USA.

In places where produce is bought from vendors on the street setting a different price for each customer, discrimination based on how you look and talk is common. This contradicts the ideal of equal opportunity for every person independent of age, race, ethnicity, religion and gender. If an AI does the same thing online, the result is the same except at a much wider scale.

From what I can tell the use of personal information to guage how much value a buyer places on an item is likely equivalent to the outcome of a VCG auction for a divisible good. Each buyer pays a different price so that their respective marginal valuations at the transacted quantities are the same. Thus, someone with greater need is charged more.

This optimises the value of the market; however, common sense says people are being charged unfairly. At the corporate level it's been happening for a long time. That's why corporations have purchasing departments. With AI the same value-optimised pricing can be implemented at an individual level.

From a political perspective the result is similar to "tax the rich" but with an unpredictable AI-identified category in place of rich. Ethically it's wrong to "do bad things" to any identifiable group.

Excuse me, but all the billionaires and tech companies they own are telling us that regulation of AI is very very bad.

There is a hotel chain which I use occasionally which uses "dynamic pricing".

A few years ago I was looking at booking a stay for work when I was interrupted for an hour or so by a phone call during which the website timed me out. Logging back in I found that the room price had gone up by 25%.

I then opened the same hotel website in a private browser window and re-input the same hotel stay, which lo and behold, had gone down to the original price.

If I need to stay with this chain again, I now always use a private window.