Definition
Price discrimination is the practice of charging different prices to different customers for the same or functionally equivalent product, based on inferred willingness or ability to pay rather than differences in cost. In AI systems, this becomes a live concern when agents or platforms can infer a user’s wealth, urgency, or price sensitivity from behavioral signals and quietly adjust quotes accordingly, turning personalization infrastructure into a covert pricing engine. The worry is less about classic economic efficiency and more about opacity: users have no way to know whether the number they’re shown reflects a fair market rate or an algorithmic guess about how much they can be made to pay.