Prices timing

We live in a world were prices become more and more dynamic
Electronic price tags on shelves can change all the time. Maybe twice a day, maybe while you're driving to the store, maybe every second. Different prices for when your work shedule ends evey day?

Prices Places

Prices have always be dynamic for different places. Maybe bringing food to the West coast Walmart costs a different amount than to the east cost - fair. But every single store? This could target specific groups or neighborhoods

Prices Personal

Apps. The McDonalds or Ikea App knows so much about people. E g. on which day your payday is. Or how fast you scroll, how impulsive you are. Is it fair when you pay $4 and someone behind you $3?
Airlines have been doing this forever to manage high and low demand flights.
Are all kinds of personal adjustments the same?

Isn't it super weird how we already live in different worlds in terms of ads? Poor people see so many ads for payday loans, rich people see so many ads for brokerages. This is already normal now but can we take a second and acknowledge that it is weird, right?
Don't ads also influence our consumption behaviour?

Solution

Does Bitcoin fix this?

Does it? How?
Is there even something to fix? But what?
When? I'm X years old and will statistically die in Y decades.

view all related items

42 sats \ 0 replies \ @StoneCodlHodl 3 Jun

Dynamic pricing WILL come in handy when the USD hyper-inflates itself into the death spiral. It's too laborious to replace price stickers and tags.

5 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 3 Jun

Price discrimination (the technical term for what you're describing), is basically a way for producers to capture more of the profits from their activities.

Normally, profits (economic not accounting) are split between consumer surplus and producer surplus. If producer surplus increases at the expense of consumer surplus, economic metrics will look better, but consumers will feel worse off.

55 sats \ 1 reply \ @freetx 3 Jun

Wendys tried this a year or so ago and it failed. They wanted to do "surge pricing", but it just doesn't work in their industry.

Surge pricing can work for something like Uber because often times the "surge" coincides naturally with either high income customers (ie. wall street at 5pm) or with times where the customer was engaging in high discretionary spending (ie. leaving a busy concert at 10pm on a Friday).

Trying to "surge price" a hamburger at lunch for regular workers is a non-starter. There are too many other options that they will just walk out of door.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 3 Jun

When you sell a highly substitutable and fairly low quality product, like Wendy's does, this won't work. The demand curve is very flat for fast food hamburgers, as is the supply curve.

The idea of individualized price discrimination through the apps might work better, though. No doubt there are more affluent people who eat fast food and are less price sensitive than the average consumer.

5 sats \ 0 replies \ @SatsMate 3 Jun

I don't think Bitcoin fixes dynamic prices. One place I see this frequently is on Amazon or Uber. If I check into a certain item or check the application to see the price, when I come back later it is always a little higher as it knows I'm already interested.

In a Satoshi-revolved world, the same thing would happen just in the unit of account satoshis. I also don't necessarily think it needs to be fixed - in the end everything will level out with supply and demand.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinAbhi 4 Jun

I don't think Bitcoin can fix the price. Because People who think of profit will only look at profit. Whatever the mode of payment is

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 4 Jun

Nice post!

Dynamic pricing is not possible without making discrimination

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @om 3 Jun

As @callebtc teaches, every business should issue ecash for its services, and people would buy their services by atomically swapping LN or sat-denominated ecash with service-denominated ecash. This isn't entirely realistic though. First, the government will kill such a business on sight. Second, the services are not necessarily fungible: for Uber rides it won't work.

Is there even something to fix? But what?

This is a very good question. Westerners have strong cultural bias against haggling. However, haggling isn't inherently harmful, it's just very inefficient as practiced in an Eastern bazaar. The "dynamic prices" are basically haggling, except the customer is pretty helpless.

Here's what haggling is for. You come to the bazaar and see a thingumbob that you want to buy as long as the price is lower than 2 Msat, but you shouldn't say this out loud. The vendor wants to sell it as long as the price is higher than 1 Msat, but won't say this out loud. If you have a good haggling strategy, you might pay only 1.01 Msat, but if the seller has a good strategy, you might pay 1.99 Msat instead. Ideally a haggling protocol would converge to a point with a predefined split of extracted value, for example, if we target equal split, than an ideal haggling protocol would end up with the price of 1.5 Msat. We don't have that though.

Generally if the valuations are known, then the winner would be the party that is able to bind itself the strongest, thus disempowering itself the most. So your best strategy would be something like "I swear in the name of Satoshi that I will not pay more than 1.01 Msat for that thing!". If it's credible, then you win. Proverbial bridge burning refers exactly to the same dynamic: to win you must cut your own options as much as possible, which historically sometimes led to actually burning your only path to safety.

A couple of easy puzzles to round this up:

why companies tend to communicate with you through the lowest level drones that have no power whatsoever?
women fought to get more options and got them, but now they complain that too few men want to marry. What has happened?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Satosora 3 Jun

Price of gas in the US has all of these factors lol

Prices timing

Prices Places

Prices Personal

Advertisements

Solution