1 - What Is the Problem with Price Personalization?

Summary

Many of our pressing questions about price personalization concern its current practice and potential regulations. We could be tempted to move directly to those hard questions because many – but not all – consumers, scholars, and regulators already believe with some confidence that price personalization harms consumers or treats them unfairly. In this chapter, I pause to unpack intuitions about harm and unfairness and consider systematically what the normative problems with price personalization might be so that our understanding can inform what we look for in existing practice and what we aim to achieve with new regulations.