
“Markets Today Are Not What We Believe” – The Façade of Competition - frgtpsswrdlame
https://promarket.org/big-data-competition/
======
mortenjorck

      “If you want, run an experiment this evening. Instead of
      using your MacBook, use a PC, you will get a cheaper price. 
      Leave your house, go to a different house, book the same 
      holiday or buy the same product, you will get a cheaper price."
    

Um... no? The Mac/PC pricing thing was _one_ travel site, and to my knowledge,
this practice is limited to travel booking sites. Amazon prices may often be
algorithmically adjusted, but _not_ per-user. There is an entire industry of
price trackers and deal blogs that would not exist if online retail used
travel-booking-style real-time price discrimination adjustment.

~~~
zeteo
> The Mac/PC pricing thing was one travel site, and to my knowledge, this
> practice is limited to travel booking sites. Amazon prices may often be
> algorithmically adjusted, but not per-user.

Yeah why worry about it if it's only happening on travel booking sites? I
mean, these practices would never be taken up by big companies with lots of
data to _really_ tailor prices per-user.

~~~
cavanasm
There's too much same product price comparison available for online retail to
do such things without being noticed. It's not that they couldn't do it and
have some level of results, it's that people would quickly become aware of it.

~~~
problems
Exactly, noticing things like this is just too easy - Friends and I frequently
discuss it when comparing prices, usually it turns out to be that one of us
found a product from a vendor via the search and one found it via a sale page.

You'll get caught all the time if you're doing this.

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_rpd
> “Today almost all the prices that you see online are actually designed for
> you. Dynamic pricing is the art of squeezing every dollar out of your
> pocket.”

Is "almost all" actually true? I know that dynamic pricing capability is being
built, and I have detected a few cases of it myself, but right now the actual
prevalence seems really low.

~~~
lotsofpulp
In my experience, the basis of the article is not true at all. However, I have
noticed that if you add something to your cart, and leave it there, then you
quite often get an email from the merchant with an offer of a discount for
buying the item.

~~~
_rpd
That's interesting, although I almost never give my email address to a
merchant before committing to a purchase, it just invites an inbox full of
spam.

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sharemywin
That's what worries me about things like Alexa and Siri, they turn just about
every market into winner take most. Siri I'd like a pizza.

"no problem I have a Domino's pizza delivered with your favorite toppings."

I was in the mood for pizza hut.

"No problem...wait domino's is having an alexa preferred partner
special...would you like $4 off?"

~~~
iamacynic
and of course, this is to amazon's benefit. the more concentrated their buying
power, the more leverage they have over the vendor, the more profits they can
squeeze from the entire supply chain, because shit rolls downhill.

most vendors of course will dive head-first into this arrangement with their
eyes wide open, because most of them don't think long-term, they want that
revenue _now_ cost-be-damned, and quite frankly they're just not as good as
the executives running amazon.

see: walmart from 10 years ago. wonder how many of those nice folks made the
move from arkansas to seattle recently...

~~~
digi_owl
I find it interesting that Dell decided to take the company off the stock
market so they could focus on the long term.

You get all these perverse incentives towards the short term via the board and
the CEOs they pick (never mind the whole stock option bonuses etc the CEOs are
offered).

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mcrad
Makes you wonder, is Ethics even a required course in a typical software
engineering curriculum?

~~~
IIIIIIIIIIII
It doesn't matter how many ethics courses are offered and taken.

The only thing I ever retweeted on my otherwise completely empty and unused
Twitter account so that I could copy and paste it when needed:

 _" For evil to triumph, all that is required is for good men to respond
rationally to incentives."_

You learn all your basic ethics during early childhood, not in university
courses. Most of the rest is the quote above. University classes talk to and
train parts of the brain whose involvement in the ethics of your decisions is
minimal.

~~~
gizmo686
>You learn all your basic ethics during early childhood.

The ethical questions a software engineer (or almost any professional) faces
are not "basic". More specifically, the "basic" ethics we learn as children
relate to direct interpersonal relations and small group dynamics (including
excessive deference to authority, which "good" ethics must unlearn).

These lessons to not prepare us to deal with questions that involve millions
of people whom we know very little about.

~~~
wpietri
Truth. Most people I have worked with know how not to be dicks. And if you put
them in a situation where the human impact of something is obvious, they'll
have the right reactions.

The challenge is to have the right reactions when you are sitting in a
comfortable office and the moral dilemmas inherent in your work are entirely
hidden by metrics, and all your bosses ask you to do is to drive the graph up
and to the right.

~~~
IIIIIIIIIIII
> _The challenge is to have the right reactions when you are sitting in a
> comfortable office and the moral dilemmas inherent in your work are entirely
> hidden by metrics, and all your bosses ask you to do is to drive the graph
> up and to the right._

And that is where I refer back to my comment: Pretty much _nobody_ will become
the whistleblower or the guy who prevents their company (or their country)
from landing that billion dollar arms sale or from raising drug prices to
levels unaffordable to many sick people even if they are perfectly well aware
of how bad it is. There is one Snowden outlier for a million other people. "If
I don't do it somebody else will" is just one of numerous rationalizations
(and it even is actually correct).

Statistically speaking the impact of ethics education vs. incentives is like 1
: 1 billion or worse.

------
SFJulie
This already happened circa 1780.

In Europa merchants were taking advantage of the numerous measure of length,
weight, volume to make customers unable to be comparing.

There was 117 measure of length used.

So as a result, Louis XVI who was influenced by the early liberal set on
course the project of the international system. The idea was a market is more
competitive if states regulate the obigation for merchant to make measure
comparable.

Hence came the meters, kg, liters and the decimal system.

It was adopted by the republican after the king was overthrown because they
were also willing for a fairer competition...

It has always stroked me as weird that USA never saw the inherent liberalist
advantage of simple measurement system.

~~~
Gibbon1
> It has always stroked me as weird that USA never saw the inherent liberalist
> advantage of simple measurement system.

I read a claim somewhere that the pox of different measurement systems wasn't
as much of an issue in Britain and it's American colonies so they stuck with
archaic but consistent units a lot longer.

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WalterBright
It's always been true that prices and service offered to you in person are
influenced by your dress, manner, the car you drove in by, the words you use,
etc.

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sharemywin
Wonder why there isn't something like ebates with a paid plan. Finds best
price with affiliate money as a rebate.

------
towersofzeyron
the obvious elephant in the room is: who's gonna fix markets that are not what
we believe? Do you have any solutions, beyond pointing out examples of what's
wrong? How do you see crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and others
playing a role?

~~~
problems
If you look at the post they're just talking about price discrimination
tactics employed by big data companies. Crypto-currencies have nothing to do
with this and no role to play.

Deal and comparison sites are the solution here basically, and they're readily
employed by people who actually use the market and don't just blindly buy from
1 seller.

tldr: If you want a good deal, go looking for one, if you don't, you get
screwed.

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pinkhasov
Incredible; not one mention of how this 'facade of competition' lowers costs
of living and caps inflation, keeping rates low, making markets go higher and
prices cheaper by making our lives easier.

