ABSTRACT
The United States is the Wild West of algorithmic personalized pricing. It is practiced (and researched) extensively, possibly more than anywhere else in the world, and at the same time, it is less regulated than in many of the jurisdictions surveyed in this Handbook, most notably the EU and China. This is not necessarily puzzling. American corporations have been the driving force behind many of the technological innovations associated with the rise and development of algorithmic personalized pricing. However, there is a long tradition in the US of opposition to regulating markets, and algorithmic personalized pricing exemplifies this approach. On this background, the goal of this Chapter is twofold.
First, the Chapter considers legal rules from various fields that can be used to regulate algorithmic personalized pricing. In mapping out and analyzing these rules, a primary aim of this Chapter is to demonstrate that many legal rules designed for seemingly unrelated purposes are, in fact, often well-suited to regulating algorithmic price personalization, with specific focus on antitrust law, consumer contracts law, and data protection law. While these legal fields have evolved, respectively, to protect competition, regulate consumers’ access to information, and protect consumers’ privacy (‘data subjects’, in European terminology), each arguably has the potential to improve how the US legal system contends with algorithmic personalized pricing …
Porat, Haggai, Algorithmic Personalized Pricing in the United States: A Legal Void (November 9, 2023), Cambridge Handbook on Price Personalization and the Law.
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