Comments on: Price discrimination on the net

By: John Sullivan

John Sullivan — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 02:20:01 +0000

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.

By: James Vasile

James Vasile — Thu, 24 May 2012 21:05:36 +0000

Ah, that’s interesting. And puzzling. And perhaps a bit comforting. Thanks!

By: Junk Buster

Junk Buster — Thu, 24 May 2012 21:01:09 +0000

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.

By: James Vasile

James Vasile — Tue, 22 May 2012 19:06:25 +0000

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).

By: Scott Carpenter

Scott Carpenter — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:35:28 +0000

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. :-)