Progressive Pricing: The Ethical Case for Price Personalization

Abstract

Price discrimination is widely considered unethical/unfair by consumers, as has been borne out by decades of psychological research and mainstream press reporting. However, little academic work has been done to investigate the ethics of price discrimination. The work that has been done to date concludes that while price discrimination is not unethical, despite widespread lay perceptions, it is at best morally neutral. We argue price discrimination is more ethical than unitary pricing, when done 'progressively,' meaning firms charge customers as a function of their willingness-to-pay. We introduce this specific kind of price discrimination as 'Progressive Pricing' and demonstrate it ethically outperforms a 'Unitary Pricing' scheme (where everyone pays the same price, regardless of their willingness-to-pay), at least within a broadly consequentialist framework. We do this by comparing a Unitary Pricing scheme to a Progressive one, analyzing them through the lenses of four different consequentialist 'Social Welfare Functions' (Utilitarian, Egalitarian, Prioritarian, and Leximin), which are used by welfare economists and philosophers to rank the distributions of different social outcomes, concluding that Progressive Pricing is preferred regardless of which Social Welfare Function(s) one finds most plausible.

Algorithmic pricing in hospitality and tourism: call for research on ethics, consumer backlash and CSR

“…To facilitate scholarly discourse on algorithmic pricing as a CSR topic, we propose the development of metrics that can quantify the impact of such practices on customers in measures that do not require specialist knowledge to interpret. Certain types of price discrimination could be, at least theoretically, more ethical toward the customer than traditional unitary pricing (Coker and Izaret, 2020), and algorithmic pricing could improve welfare (Seele et al , 2021). Such cases must also be incorporated in the measures, even if the nature of for-profit business may motivate companies to work against the consumer.…”