Inflation’s Spies: The Labor of Surveillance Pricing

This paper examines price surveillance practices through a critical analysis of the retail price monitoring industry. Also known as “pricing intelligence,” price monitoring firms are brokers that traffic in information about the marketing, merchandizing, and inventory strategies of clients’ competitors. In online (e-commerce) settings, pricing intelligence is automated by web crawlers and algorithms; in brick-and-mortar retail, by contrast, firms hire price monitoring firms to collect, col