Haggai Porat, ‘Behavior-Based Price Discrimination and Data Protection in the Age of Algorithms’, available at SSRN (31 October 2022); Haggai Porat, ‘Bargaining with Algorithms: An Experiment on Algorithmic Price Discrimination and Consumer and Data Protection Laws’, available at SSRN (29 April 2025). A central interest in consumer law is the harm AI algorithms might cause to consumers. Firms are increasingly gaining the power to target individual consumers in manipulative ways and charge prices tailored to each buyer’s ability to pay. People may end up buying things they do not need or regret, at prices exceeding those in the pre-algorithmic market. Rivers of academic ink are spilled in describing the potential harms and recommending urgent regulatory action. Some of that work is very good, although the entire genre is suffering from an acute oversight: it ignores the documented benefits pricing algorithms are bringing to consumers … (more)
[Omri Ben-Shahar, JOTWELL, 9 September 2025]
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