
If you use a Mac or Android, e-commerce sites may be charging you more - altern8
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/03/if-you-use-a-mac-or-an-android-e-commerce-sites-may-be-charging-you-more/?tid=rssfeed
======
bdkoepke
I use [http://camelcamelcamel.com](http://camelcamelcamel.com) for amazon
price tracking. Does anyone know of any other websites like this with price
tracking?

For instance, Artificial intelligence a modern approach is $135 right now, but
using this site I can see that it was <$90 in January of this year and it hit
$100 in September: [http://camelcamelcamel.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-
Ap...](http://camelcamelcamel.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-Approach-
Edition/product/0136042597?context=browse)

Same story with Introduction to Algorithms, except it is now $80 and the
lowest it hit was $44 in October: [http://camelcamelcamel.com/Introduction-
Algorithms-Edition-T...](http://camelcamelcamel.com/Introduction-Algorithms-
Edition-Thomas-Cormen/product/0262033844?context=browse)

~~~
hrjet
But then, how would you be sure that web sites like camelcamelcamel.com are
not price-steering you with false data?

~~~
cooper12
While it's true that they might have the incentive to do this because of
affiliate fees, they'd need access to the particular site's price-steering
specifics, which I doubt they'd give out due to competitive reasons. (For
Amazon itself, the OP article doesn't mention price-steering, and the incident
from 2000 it linked [1] quotes CEO who promised to never do it again)

If they don't have access to that, they can't price-steer or else users would
notice discrepancies between the listed price and the site's price and the
main users of those sites are the price-minded.

[1]
[http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2000/09/25/daily2...](http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2000/09/25/daily21.html)

~~~
hrjet
That's a great point, but I think multiple approaches could be possible. For
example, manipulating historical data to make the current price point
attractive. That would be difficult for the user to verify.

~~~
cooper12
Wow that sure would be insidious and hard to notice. I guess at the end of the
day it comes down to whether you trust the site enough and what they could
stand to gain from it.

------
justcommenting
these practices are converging on something like a 21st century version of
redlining, and i hope consumer advocates will work to expose and address these
modern forms of _opaque_ price discrimination.

some may claim that these practices can benefit consumers, but unless it's
done transparently in ways that consumers know and understand, it primarily
serves to increase information asymmetry.

~~~
cpeterso
Time to remove OS information leakage from user agent string? Sites could
still profile users by browser (e.g. Safari), though.

~~~
justcommenting
I would encourage people to

1) collect data and submit written complaints to regulators like the FTC if
they believe they've identified unfair or deceptive business practices

2) boycott companies that engage in these practices, and ask your friends to
do the same

3) consider technical mitigations like the de-identifying properties that
using the Tor Browser Bundle offers

------
lorddoig
> Unfortunately, the business logic underlying much of this personalization
> remains a mystery.

Price discrimination appears, at first glance, to be about maximising profit,
but really it's about _clearing the market_.

Say you're a cinema, and you set your list price for a ticket at £10. 20
adults show up and buy the tickets and are happy. Then 10 students show up,
scoff, and go home - they weren't willing to go above £7. The market has not
cleared: you'd be happier with £70 from them than the nothing you've got, and
the students would be happier being £70 worse off but having seen the film.
Neither party got what they wanted, no trade occurred, and no economic value
was created.

The situation could be improved so that everybody gets what they want without
harming anybody else: set a student rate at £7. Students get to see the films
and your cinema makes more money - everyone is as happy as they _could_ be.

In this example, the criteria for price discrimination is discovered by
intuition, existing knowledge of students, maybe surveys. But even this isn't
ideal - what about that one _really_ tight student who buys pasta in 20kg bags
and who values a trip to the cinema at £4? Ideally you want their £4 and they
want to see the film - but how to cater for them without shooting yourself in
the foot by making the student price £4 across the board?

Until the advent of the internet and fancy algorithms that could at least try
to understand you, you couldn't. But today maybe we can.

Everyone has their own "true" valuation for a given product ( _not_ how much
they think it should be worth, but how much they're willing to pay), and if
you're a supplier with a magic ball which can divine this with 100% accuracy
then you're as well selling your product at 1p over cost if that's your
customer's true valuation. Again: they get the product they wanted and you get
profit you couldn't have had any other way, and everyone's as happy as they
can be.

But we don't have magic balls, and you can't ask someone for their true
valuation because suddenly you'll find yourself knee-deep in a bartering game
of bullshit and lies. Your only option is to try to divine it somehow.

This is what these guys are doing. And it's a good thing. To say "this is
wrong and it should stop" is incredibly selfish - with reference to the
example above, an equivalent statement might be "Yes I'll pay £10 to see this
movie, but only if those students don't get a discount, which I implicitly
understand to mean robbing you, dear cinema owner, of £70, and those students
of the chance to see this hot new flick, even though both of those things are
fuck all to do with me."

If you're a habitual bargain hunter (not out of necessity, more as a
personality trait) and you're feeling affronted by this then all you need do
is take a cue from these companies and adjust your tactics to suit the 21st
century. Googling around may have done you proud up til now, but the world has
moved on. I daresay that once you've mastered the art of using a VPN, user
agent spoofing, and possibly the cultivation of a set of dishonest consumer
profiles, you may find you'll save _even_ more money in the face of this new
enemy.

~~~
harryh
You know those psychology games where there are two people and the first
person is given $10 to split between the two of them. They can split $5/$5 or
$1/$9 or even $.01/$9.99. Then the second person can either accept the split
and take their share or nix the whole deal and no one gets anything.

Aggressive price discrimination reminds me of this game. If I'm willing to pay
exactly £20 to see that movie and the movie theatre is charging £19.99 I
should take that deal. Even if they're only charging you £9.99 (because your
willingness to pay is only £10).

Taking that deal is the right thing to do. Right?

But it turns out in those experiments that if the split proposed is two uneven
then the second person will say screw it. No one gets nothing! People have an
innate sense of fairness.

The same thing applies to what's going on here. Something about charging
people differently based on their User-Agent really rubs people the wrong way.
It's a step too far so they just table flip and say screw it.

Is it rational in an homo economicus kind of way? Nope. Is the the way people
actually behave. Yup.

~~~
pwnna
I don't remember where I saw this, but I believe this has to do with culture.
In North America what you described is true, where as in developing countries
it is not. The second person would rather just take whatever money is given
and run.

If someone can remind me of the name of this game I can find it..

~~~
nebula
_In North America what you described is true, where as in developing countries
it is not._

Not true. The game was conducted in "developing countries" as well, and the
results seem to be same. I can't locate the references right now, but a little
googling might help (Especially I remember the results being mentioned one of
the TED talks.)

~~~
thisjepisje
I remember at least one case where the game was played, and the person who got
to choose took 9 bucks out of 10, and they all thought it was fair, simply
because he was lucky to be the guy who got to choose.

edit: it's in the article HaloZero links in this thread.

 _When he began to run the game it became immediately clear that Machiguengan
behavior was dramatically different from that of the average North American.
To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition,
when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the
lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you
would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t
understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good
luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”_

------
calbear81
I can provide some insight into why the hotel prices are different (I run
Room77, a hotel metasearch site). Generally, many hotels enforce a parity
price display rule with their sellers (think Minimum Advertised Price) so the
travel sites aren't supposed to market a rate below the market price. There
are exceptions built in for "members only" clubs since these users are gated
and allowed to get a non-public rate. There are also exceptions in some cases
for mobile rate discounting since they are generally last minute and if you
have the app installed you could technically be considered part of a "club".

------
userbinator
I wonder if this works in the other direction too: pretend you're accessing
their site from e.g. IE6 on Win98... or maybe a somewhat more recent but still
extremely-outdated configuration that at least will work with their site.

Several years ago, for a brief period I used _no_ user-agent header, which
caused quite a few sites to show nothing more than an obscure "500 internal
server error" message, which disappeared as soon as a UA header was added,
even if it contained nothing more than random rubbish.

~~~
taspeotis
Using a shitty browser can cost you more [1].

[1] [http://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-
explorer-7-tax/](http://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/)

------
pixelcort
Here's an auction style that could be used to determine an optimal price,
particularly for digital goods:

1\. Each shopper specifies the max they're willing to pay for the item.
Perhaps pre-auth this price on their credit card.

2\. Merchant calculates - for every hypothetical price point - total revenue
from all the shoppers who would we willing to pay at least that hypothetical
price.

3\. Whichever price causes the most revenue wins. All shoppers who are willing
to pay at least this much are charged and receive the item.

------
trhway
Cue in Digital Millenium Retail Act prohibiting circumvention of technical
measures of personalization (like turning cookies off with intent to
circumvent personalization)...

------
egeozcan
> Doepfner said the resulting dramatic drop in traffic to his company's
> publications was proof of Google's overwhelming power in the search market.
> He said he hoped lawmakers, courts and competition regulators would take
> action to curb its powers.

No the dramatic drop was caused by you relying on a search engine's news
section too much to build your online business and then simply ditching it
with no alternative. If Google has overwhelming power in the search market,
then Bild has overwhelming power in the newspaper market. Not being able to
utilize that is your fault and it's pathetic (sorry for the strong word) to
call lawmakers into action in this case.

------
goforads
It's worth reading the actual paper closely.

[http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/cbw/pdf/imc151-hannak.pdf](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/cbw/pdf/imc151-hannak.pdf)

The authors didn't find any smoking gun. None. Zero.

They found some travel sites offering member discounts--no surprise there.
They also found sellers were personalizing search rankings--no surprise again.
And they found a persistent pricing differential for Home Depot, but were
careful to note that it could be a server-side quirk.

------
newscracker
It shouldn't be difficult for someone to come up with a meta-search service
that would search for prices from multiple geographical locations, different
user agents and (with lesser likelihood) different user profiles. Such a
service would also have to provide the user the ability to use the lowest
priced profile to complete the purchase (although this may not work for all
websites).

Is there already something that fulfills at least the first two criteria
across a range of products, services and sellers?

------
throwaway_xl5
Nuance's commerce site gave me a half-price offer when browsed from Chrome on
Android that was not visible on the same browser on Linux and Windows
machines. I suspect that it was some kind of error since it wasn't declared as
a special offer, just shown with a lower price. I was actually quite surprised
when the lower price held all the way through online checkout as I imagined
the stock and checkout functions would be managed separately from the main
site.

------
harryjo
Not that the WaPo article links _directly_ to a September _2000_ article about
Amazon doing a _random_ (not demographic) price test, while claiming it
happened in 2010. Does WaPo believe in time travel, or just cheap smears
against Amazon?

------
snlacks
I don't really mind, but I see why people do. What bothered me is when I
opened an incognito browser to look at Home Depot, then moved to Amazon, the
latter was showing me a bunch of tools and MAN STUFF (weights, leather
jackets, etc).

------
click170
There are browser extensions to automatically compare prices for you already,
is there something insufficient about those extensions or is it just that they
aren't widely known and used?

~~~
murphm8
Do you have a recommendation for which extension or extensions to use?

~~~
newscracker
Apart from camelcamelcamel, there's also Invisible Hand [1] for Firefox,
Chrome and Safari that provides price comparison and updates. I doubt if it
can avoid browser sniffing or fingerprinting though. Also, it works only in
the U.S., the UK and Germany and it makes money from commissions paid by some
retailers.

Any kind of comparison is better than no comparison at all. :)

[1]: [http://www.getinvisiblehand.com/](http://www.getinvisiblehand.com/)

------
etep
So basically e-commerce sites are charging me more?

