Personalised Pricing and Human Agency

Consumer Law and Policy
Personalised Pricing and Human Agency

REGISTER NOW

This seminar looks at personalised pricing. The evidence suggests that the public dislikes the practice, even when they might gain from it. So far, this dislike has restricted its adoption by companies fearing a PR backlash. Ironically, it takes us back to a pre-mass market era when prices were individualised. It can be seen as humanising the AI age. Even in mass markets, when individuals meet traders, there has been some personalisation, and this can be based on sex and race discrimination in the car showroom. But we see more progressive examples of tradesmen pricing jobs differently for wealthy professionals and poor pensioners. The more we characterise it as a discount and not a price uplift, the more acceptable it is. Should we therefore be grateful that we can be revealed as the humans we are to buyers? Is public dislike of the use of their data in this way sufficient justification for controlling or prohibiting the practice?

Speaker
Geraint Howells is Established Professor of Law at the University of Galway, where he was previously Executive Dean for Business, Public Policy and Law. Prior to that he was Professor of Commercial Law and Associate Dean in Humanities for Internationalisation at Manchester University, where he remains a visiting professor. He has been Dean of Law at the City University of Hong Kong and Head of the Law Schools in Manchester and Lancaster. He was called to the bar in 2002 through a special route for distinguished academics and was awarded an LLD in 2014. He has published extensively on consumer law, product liability and European private law and was a member of the Acquis group developing common principles of European contract law and tort law. A former President of the International Association of Consumer Law, he edited the Consumer Law Journal for many years, is on the editorial board of the Journal of Consumer Policy and European Review of Private Law and is Series Editor for Routledge’s Markets and Law series. He has undertaken extensive consultancy for government, the EU and NGOs.