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Developers of pricing strategies in e-commerce businesses see a wide range of opportunities for deploying online price discrimination techniques given their ability to track consumers’ online identity and behavior. In theory, an increasing use of personal data enables organizations to show every single consumer their own personalized price, which is determined by the consumer’s characteristics, e.g. age, gender, surfing history, or location. This paper aims to explore the existence of online price discrimination activities within the German ecommerce market using a three-method approach. First, inquiring the online retailers via email and investigating their public documents; second, surveying students; and third, using a software crawler to simulate surfing activity. Our results do not provide any evidence of individualized price discrimination, which, we argue, is due to economic and political reasons, not technical reasons.

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Feb 28th, 8:00 AM

Investigating Personalized Price Discrimination of Textile-, Electronics- and General Stores in German Online Retail

Developers of pricing strategies in e-commerce businesses see a wide range of opportunities for deploying online price discrimination techniques given their ability to track consumers’ online identity and behavior. In theory, an increasing use of personal data enables organizations to show every single consumer their own personalized price, which is determined by the consumer’s characteristics, e.g. age, gender, surfing history, or location. This paper aims to explore the existence of online price discrimination activities within the German ecommerce market using a three-method approach. First, inquiring the online retailers via email and investigating their public documents; second, surveying students; and third, using a software crawler to simulate surfing activity. Our results do not provide any evidence of individualized price discrimination, which, we argue, is due to economic and political reasons, not technical reasons.

 

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