Ban algorithmic pricing, NDP urges Carney: ‘Downright creepy’

I'm going with the term "Price Discrimination", cause thats what it is.

Creepy pricing. Call it what it is. Creeps doing creepy stuff. 

I wonder what they’d charge you if you have very little tracking footprint?

Stalker Pricing.

The main point of contention here is algorithmic pricing, where prices are automatically adjusted on the fly based on the time, inventory, and even data about the buyer. This creates a *massive* information asymmetry because an algorithm can shuffle prices based on billions of data points on the fly while a consumer has no way to counter or predict the likely cost beforehand.  The article touches on the most famous example of this: rental platforms that could recalculate the rents it offers daily based on market trends and even private data offered by its competitors (which is essentially tacit* collusion).  > Last year, the Competition Bureau also investigated the possible use of artificial intelligence-driven algorithmic pricing in Canadian real estate rental markets. > In November, it said that while it hasn’t found evidence that using computer software to recommend rent prices reaches the level of anti-competitive behaviour, it remains concerned about possible issues. We're seeing the literal textbook economic definition of price discrimination: charging each buyer the exact highest price they are willing to pay for a good. It's a nightmare.  (Edit: "tacit" was autocorrected by mistake)

Discounts? Maybe you aren't familiar with grocers in Canada. Much like housing here, grocery prices are only allowed to go up. I don't see Canadian retailers spending money on a new pricing system to charge anyone less than they are now. Some people might pay less than others, but everyone will end up paying more.

> Some degree of time based or yeild pricing has valid reasons to exist. I agree. I am ok with something like they charge something on weekend lunch vs weekday lunch. As long as its consistent every week. But changing something on the fly is just crazy.

it really doesnt price of goods should reflect cost + a reasonable margin not the highest price point people will pay in a given moment. thats capitalism gone wild without regulation.

Or make the price for the last 90 days publicly listed.

I don't even take much issue in prices changing on the fly but they shouldn't change depending on who the buyer is.

The problem with dynamic prices is that the original price point is the minimum price. Dynamic pricing would be amazing on average you got better prices when the demand was low and supply was high. I mean basic things like Ebay effectively run off dynamic pricing but as it's consumer to consumer and there is a vague price you still have that feeling of getting a deal. When its business to consumer it never feels like you're getting a deal.

Yeah its called happy hour and it's a d*******. Dynamic pricing just sounds like there is no upper limit

“Hey, she always buys this salad on Monday. Increase the price by a dollar and see if she’ll still go for it.” Creepy is correct.

What do you think all these personalized loyalty programs like moi, and optimum are?  It's personalized pricing, marketed as a d*******. There's a reason your regular items are rarely included in the personalized offers. 

You'll notice that merchants openly haggling for prices has mostly fallen out of favor in the developed world for a number of good reasons, chief among them being that consumers prefer predictable pricing that minimizes the amount of hassle they go through every time they want to make a purchase. 

In this context, we mean algorithmic pricing, AKA surveillance pricing. As in, you go into a store, there are only digital prices, and the price of plungers jumps from $10 to $100 because your Google history shows you searched for "how to unclog a toilet" 15 minutes ago, so the algorithm knows you *really* need a plunger right now. It is highly predatory and anti-consumer. Exactly the type of situation where the government should step in with sane, reasonable and simple laws to protect its citizenry.

Haggling is only fun for extroverts?

You could haggle it. There's no haggling now, so it's only fair that the seller is open about their prices.

For a serious answer and not just being snarky: The fundamental issue is the opportunity imbalance. There are also other problems that I'm not going to write into the comment, but consider how issues are magnified by this kind of pricing in a near monopoly or with bad actor collusion (Canadian telecoms, groceries, etc) Say you're buying a jar of formula. A seller offers you a price with an algorithm at time of purchase, customized to the maximum you can pay. This is done automatically, en masse and with a ton of granularity on your situation. If you accept, they harvest the surplus and if you don't the algorithm adjusts and there's 1,000 people behind you to offer the product to. You *see* a price at a physical store that you have to go to. If you don't want to accept that price, you have to go to another store.  - is there another store in your town? In many smaller places, there's not. - how long will it take you to go somewhere else and check? What's the risk that their price is even worse?  - do you have a car? Is your baby currently hungry? Do you have to go to work soon? These factors and a thousand others are known to the algorithm, and it will use them to take as much money from you as possible.  We aren't living in a 1300s market town. Loblaws isn't afraid of being run out of town for screwing the widow Eunice like John the Grocer may have been. Pretending the two situations are the same is disingenuous.

This is the kind of thinking that got us to where we are now. To answer simply: the fundamental problem with it is that corporations will take advantage of this and screw us over. If they can, they will.

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One common example of algorithmic market management right now is contract nursing in the states.  Software takes data sourced from private brokers about nurses, including purchase habits and credit. Wages offered are cut if a nurse is emitting "desperation signals" like having a lot of debt, or one who accepts lots of shifts at weird hours. Since they're offered less money, nurses in these situations now take even longer to build up retirement savings, pay off school or buy homes. This beautiful market efficiency ensures that shareholders extract maximum potential value, while you're given potentially dangerous medications by a sleep deprived, desperate wage slave living out of a filthy slum. Since your catchment area is now (statistically) controlled by a single venture capital group, both you and the nurses are given a single price and a single wage, calculated to the maximum you can pay and the minimum they can sell - the investment class pockets the difference. /s if you couldn't tell - a market with this amount of information and power imbalance isn't efficient, much the opposite. This is an example of what is now colloquially called "Enshittification" (see Cory Doctorow's lovely blog pluralistic.net for a more informed summary)

A market so efficient you will never save a dime for retirement

Efficient markets require participants to have all information needed to determine an optimal trade price. It's not an efficient market when one participant is an exhausted dad trying to buy cough syrup for their kid, and the other participant is a chain p******* that detected a localized flu outbreak based on a 31% increase in cough syrup purchases across 28 different stores and estimates that it can increase cough syrup profits by 6% by automatically increasing prices at all affected stores by 15%.

Companies and corporations squeezing every penny that they can from people is not what i would call efficiency. Downright dystopian actually.

> There is nothing wrong with businesses being offered up to date information by willing and honest fellow business owners. Now for the definition of price fixing: >Price fixing is an anticompetitive agreement between participants on the same side in a market to buy or sell a product, service, or commodity only at a fixed price, or maintain the market conditions such that the price is maintained at a given level by controlling supply and demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing

Not to mention that the advertised price could end up changing between when you grab it and when you pay for it. You'd have no way of knowing short of taking a photo of all the prices and then checking your receipt to make sure they match.

A lot of grocery stores already use LCD price tags that are updated by staff regularly, it might be simpler than you think.

Yeah, prices are low at a long timeframe out, because there's unlimited supply and no meaningful demand. As more people book, and supply lowers, pricing increases. This also has an effect of acting as a distributive load balancing factor. If you have a flight each day of the week going to X. And Wednesdays has more supply, well you can offer pricing to those that have more flexibility on which day they can travel. Then really close to the flight depending on whether the flight has room or not, ticket prices can go higher or lower to try and fill the flight to capacity. If someone waits until an hour before a flight and gets a deal, because either they are in the seat, or the seat is empty. That's fine. But the risk is that it won't always work and if they need to be somewhere soon they might also end up paying out the arse to do so. **The key difference is** there is nothing personal about this to the airline. They aren't looking at you on a $300k a year salary and saying they can charge you more. They aren't looking at the person on $50k a year and charging them a minimum. Every buyer that rocks up at that time. Will get the same price. Algorithmic pricing determining that you're going to pay $10 more for video games because "You can afford it" is bullshit. Because they have no context of whether that's true or not. There are people who unfortunately live beyond their means. The algorithm taking advantage of you because it estimates that you could spend even more is not something that should be encouraged. IMO the only time your income/wealth should factor into anything is when you get fined for things like traffic offences. A speeding ticket to someone on minimum wage might be a soul crushing amount of money. For a rich enough person it might be a rounding error.

He won't take this on, of course. Carney is doing a lot of shit liberals don't like precisely because everyone still hates PP more than Carney. Carney is way further right than most liberals would want, but PP makes it impossible to vote otherwise. The NDP needs to rebuild badly.

His book says that but, like a lot of things he's said as PM, his actions don't appear to follow

For example, I was in a department store when I got a call from a lawyer about his computer, and I spent 40 minutes talking with him about tech support. For the next few weeks I got a ton of ads for shelving units that were next to me in the aisle I was in while on the phone. Even on tech sites like Slashdot. Nothing about legal services, or computer stuff; because listening would be illegal, but location tracking is legal.

From what I’ve read, there’s no evidence to corroborate this? The imei readers I mean. I know they use WiFi and Bluetooth for dwell time and for traffic, and facial recognition, but MAC address tracking has to comply with PIPEDA, often requiring notices or opt-outs. Also, imei can’t be read by anything other than the cellular network, and isn’t broadcast or able to be pinged by phones, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to describe here.

Ah, I guess so. I checked to see if iOS or Android allow accessing the IMEI number via apps, and as far as I can tell they used to allow it, but more recent versions (Android 10) lock down that information. However, they provide access to other unique identifiers like the advertisingID. I think I was thinking of the MAC address, not the IMEI. If the phone's Wi-Fi is on, you can read the MAC address from a distance (10-100 meters). A bluetooth ID can be read from 10-33 ft distance, and sometimes up to 70 meters.

Carney is soooo in bed with the billionaires. Yes, I get Carney is "better than the other guy," but he's still Harper-lite and conservative at heart.

That's the thing most are not grasping. It's individual pricing based on your specific data. No one is arguing against businesses being able to change or set pricing. The issue is the specific individual pricing. I mean even just image group dynamic pricing based on political affiliation or skin color or census data or employer or wireless provider or whatever.

That makes no sense. Why wouldn't they just raise the price for everyone? What are poor people gonna do, refuse to buy gas? Gas isn't a luxury item

Actually, algorithmic pricing often advantages more obviously wealthy people (ie nice cars) because they present a greater opportunity for high value repeat business.

You didn't really understand what I meant.

Charging more from a wealther client is part of it. Regardless it kills true price discovery and is damaging to markets.

[more immigration ](https://thewalrus.ca/ndp-leader-avi-lewis-wants-to-reverse-carneys-immigration-cuts/) is the answer tho, right ?

And I mean across different stores, if that part of the "price fixing" didn't come through. Even a casual on-looker to the stock market with absolutely and to knowledge can see that the market is being manipulated, imagine turning a groceries trip into a speculative buying instrument..... But one sided.

Of course you will benefit. I show up right now for Wendy's at lunch at the line is HUUUUGE. So i can't even get the lunch in the time i have. If they dynamically raised price, the line would go down - and I would actually have a choice to pay that or not.