When the Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good: Price Discrimination, Affordability, Precarity and Market Dynamism

Price discrimination is facing growing consumer and regulatory backlash due to the emergence of “surveillance pricing,” which uses personal data to set individualized prices. Machine learning algorithms draw on a customer’s purchase history, location, demographic characteristics, credit information, and even cursor movements or inferred emotional states to estimate willingness to pay with unprecedented precision, bringing markets closer to the theoretical case of perfect price discriminati