Personalized Pricing Creates No Consumer Winners, Economists Argue
moultano · x · 2026-11-15
- Context: @halsinger criticizes The Economist's defense of personalized pricing, arguing that even if a seller prices one penny below every customer's willingness to pay (WTP), each consumer earns zero surplus — there are no consumer "winners" — and that such pricing incentivizes pervasive privacy invasion, extinguishing privacy's intrinsic economic value.
- moultano's counterpoint: maximizing producer surplus makes no sense — if all surplus were producer surplus and consumer surplus vanished, everyone would be worse off, since producers would be indifferent about how to spend that money.
- A substantive back-and-forth on the welfare distribution and privacy costs of algorithmic personalized pricing.
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