Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments April 17, 2023 erstellt
Description:
This chapter aims to disentangle and elucidate several normative concerns that we may have about price personalization, or the imperfect individuation of prices for consumers based on a variety of features that sellers know about them, such as their purchasing history, income or wealth, location, and browsing history. Initially, I consider the demands and normative potential of transparency. I consider the nature of any deception, the kind of information that sellers fail to disclose that they ought to disclose, and the justification for any duty to disclose it. I conclude that sellers do have a duty to disclose certain facts about price personalization. Nevertheless, individual consent to transactions fails to launder the practice not just because consent is likely to be defective in some important ways but also because some of the problems with personalization are social harms and injustices that individuals do not have the power to make permissible by way of their consent.I consider three such harms in turn. First, price personalization might violate or undermine privacy. The practice could violate individual privacy if seller use of data improperly entails usurping control over information that is properly controlled by its subjects, or because personalization uses certain kinds of information against the subject’s own interests. Price personalization might undermine privacy systemically because it creates incentives to collect information about personal characteristics that we do not control and to use that information in a social sphere that we want to keep insulated from the effects of those personal characteristics. Alternatively, personalization might undermine privacy in our society if it subjects certain private behaviors to scrutiny and consequences that will constrain or simply skew our choices in ways that we regard as undesirable.Second, personalization might produce regressive distributive effects along several axes: from consumers to sellers; new or small sellers to large, established sellers, and; weak consumers to strong consumers. It might also segment markets in ways that exacerbate the social consequences of inequaltiy.Finally, price personalization might run afout of a default principle of equal treatment in the marketplace absent socially defensible justification