What types of price discrimination are common today?
Senior-citizen and student discounts are a well-known type of price discrimination. The airlines have used price discrimination since the industry was deregulated about 20 years ago. You can also see price discrimination in scholarly journal publishing. As the journals move online, the incentive to price-discriminate and the ability to do so are both growing. Look at the JSTOR project — a nonprofit that makes available electronic versions of archived issues of scholarly journals. The pricing for U.S. educational institutions varies because JSTOR prices the journals based on the value to the school, not the number of copies sold. So if you’re a large institution that views an article many times, you pay more. Such usage data was simply not available in the print world. Thus more information about customers — less privacy — provided by modern technologies leads to more price discrimination. Q: Are there any benefits to eroding privacy and differential pricing? A: Standard economic doc
