This is awesome and scary, and I wish I understood it a bit better.
I opened Overnightprints.com in Firefox and saw that they are offering me 50 business cards for $3.96.
But I don’t usually buy things in Firefox. My internet shopping browser is usually Chromium. So I opened up the same page there and discovered that the price goes up to $4.15 when I use Chromium.
I’ve never bought anything from Overnight Prints before, although maybe I did once create an account.
This is creepy. What’s going on here? My suspicion is that my Firefox profile is me without the shopping whereas my Chromium profile is mostly the shopping. So Firefox James looks like a pauper or a skinflint, but Chromium James is a free spending whale who won’t balk at an extra 19 cents. I bet Chromium James is more fun at a bar.
This kind of price discrimination allows Overnight Prints to pick multiple points on the curve and extract consumer surplus from me. When companies talk about the great benefits of trading privacy for online convenience, this is the stuff they are talking about. This unidrectional transparency (I know nothing about them) lets them push margins 5% by quickly switching the price tags as I walk in the front door. When I notice the switcheroo in progress, though, I feel quite like they are trying to swindle me.
And nobody much cares about 5% on a set of disposable business cards, but it makes me wonder where else I am paying an extra 5 percent.
I saw Andrew Odlyzko speak at the University of Minnesota and he presented a “standard argument” for price discrimination, showing how it can be economically efficient, e.g.:
Charlie is willing to prepare a report on digital cash (or whatever) for $1500.
Alice is willing to pay $700.
Bob is willing to pay $1000.
Uniform pricing makes the transaction impossible, but charging Alice $650 and Bob $950 would make everyone better off.
Although Andrew pointed out that this assumes people are indifferent to what other people pay, which is clearly not true. :-)
Sure, and to say this bit of price discrimination rubbed me the wrong way is not to say anything about the efficiency of price discrimination. It cost overnightprints.com a sale, but that’s economically somewhat neutral (somebody else picked it up).
I got the same price difference. If I use Chrome, Safari or Opera prices start at $4.15 but if I use Firefox or Camino I pay $3.96.
It’s not the case they’ve figured out you use Chromium to do your shopping; I use Firefox for this but got the same result as you. For some reasons they load different content to browsers that identify themselves as Firefox. In Camino’s about:config I changed the value of general.useragent.extra.notfox to a random string in Camino and I got the content shown to non-Firefox browsers.
Oddly, though, after changing the value back to ‘(like Firefox/3.6.28)’ I still get the content for non-Firefox browsers – even after clearing all history etc.
Ah, that’s interesting. And puzzling. And perhaps a bit comforting. Thanks!
Hm, I get $4.15 in both Chromium and Iceweasel. Android browser gives me $4.95! Unless I click on the front page business card image, in which case it gives me $4.15.
I have a feeling maybe this isn’t browser discrimination but rather some randomized price testing stuff. Or incompetence, given that they showed me two different prices in one browser.