Price and the person: markets, discrimination, and personhood

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how pricing has historically been involved in the making up of persons and how the ability to ‘personalize’ price is reconfiguring the ability of markets to discriminate. We discuss a variety of contemporary pricing practices, and three types of personhood they produce: generic, protected, and transcontextual. While some contemporary developments in pricing draw on understandings of the person that are quite familiar, others are novel and likely to be contested. We argue that many newer pricing techniques make it harder for consumers to identify themselves as part of a recognized group. We conclude that contemporary price personalization should be understood in terms of the intensification of individualization in combination with dividualization, and as such, contributes to novel and consequential forms of classification.

KEYWORDS:

• Price
• pricing
• personhood
• data
• marketing
• transcontextual

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Liz Moor is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Celia Lury is Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick.

Notes

1 For example, in medicine, the ‘4Ps’ are said to be Predictive, Preventive, Personalized, and Participatory (Distler 2008). This culture of personalization (Lury and Day, forthcoming) has also been observed in the music industry (Hoffman quoted in Seaver 2015), in online news and advertising (Turow 2011), and in internet search (Pariser 2011).

2 We use the term ‘personhood’ to acknowledge that what counts as person is historically and culturally variable (Carrithers et al. 2008) and to acknowledge that what constitutes a person emerges as a complex interplay of self, subjectivity, behavior, and individual and collective identity.

3 Englund and Leach (2000, p. 229) observe that it has become ‘current anthropological wisdom’ that ‘all persons are both dividuals and individuals.’ In what follows, we suggest personalized pricing strategies bring together individualizing and dividualizing practices to produce what we call a specific kind of (in)dividual, namely, transcontextual persons.

4 Although here too there was variation of persons according to contexts. In the case of UK nationalization, for example, there were different ‘moral economies’ associated with the train service, which was differentiated by price (first and second class, later first and ‘standard’ class), compared with the National Health Service, where the direct cost was not charged to patient, and service was the same for everyone.

5 Of course, these ‘individual’ members may themselves be composite, both in the sense of making purchases for more than themselves, and cards being able to be used by more than one person. In many cases, more than one card is provided so that different people’s behaviour is distinguished within a single identifying account. In this way, membership defines an individuated identity that is not necessarily tied to household or family but may be more than one and less than many.

6 As this example suggests, how price is varied in relation to person and the other ‘P’s seems to depend on a variety of factors. The CEO of a software firm combining data analysis with ‘smart’ supermarket shelving says,

I don’t see dynamic pricing happening in major retailers. … Supermarkets have huge, complicated logistics systems. They can’t react in real time to what’s going in their stores the way Amazon can. [Physical retailers] want to discount, to have more relevant deals, fewer promotions, better value and more customer loyalty. That’s not about changing the price of individual products, it’s more about changing deals. (quoted in Walker 2017)

7 Although it is not the primary concern of this paper, we note that in such cases ‘points’ are able to function as a currency, the exchange value of which is determined by the card provider. In this perhaps minimal sense, such cards provide the basis for both new forms of money and forms of consumer citizenship.

8 This lack of transparency or information about variation in prices and pricing techniques, and the consequent isolation of consumers from others with whom they might act collectively, is underscored by the fact that much of the literature exploring price discrimination in particular, and data mining in general, recommends strategies of resistance that depend almost entirely on individual acts of disruption (Nissenbaum and Brunton 2015), including experimentation with different platforms in order to get the ‘best price’ (Hannak et al. 2014).