A newly enacted New York law requires retailers to say whether your data influences the price of basic goods like a dozen eggs or toilet paper, but not how. If you're near Rochester, New York, the price for a carton of Target's Good & Gather eggs is listed as $1.99 on its website. It's unclear why the prices differ, but a new notice on Target's website offers a potential hint: "This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data." A recently enacted New York State law requires businesses that algorithmically set prices using customers' personal data to disclose that. According to the law, personal data includes any data that can be "linked or reasonably linked, directly or indirectly, with a specific consumer or device." The law doesn't require businesses to explicitly state what information about a person or device is being used or how each piece of information affects the final price a customer sees.

'Surveillance pricing': Why you might be paying more than your neighbour You go into a store to buy a two-litre bottle of milk at your local supermarket and pay $3. But the person before you in the queue paid $3.50. And the person after you paid $2. What if those prices were based on your personal data or circumstances, or even the battery power on your phone? This may sound like science fiction, but it's not as far-fetched as you might think. In July, US group Delta Air Lines revealed that approximately 3 percent of its domestic fare pricing is determined using artificial intelligence (AI) - although it has not elaborated on how this happens. The company said it aims to increase this figure to 20 percent by the end of this year.

Putting yourself out there always comes at a cost: you have to be vulnerable, open yourself up and risk rejection. These days it can also come with a hefty price tag. It's not just the cost of drinks or dinner to consider. Before you've even got to the awkward, age-old dance of who is going to foot the bill, you might have already forked out hundreds of pounds on a dating site to be in with the shot for a date. While some dating services are free, many now include tempting extra features that they claim will help you find more compatible connections, get noticed sooner and go on more dates.

According to the main international reports, more pervasive industrial and business-process automation, thanks to machine learning and advanced analytic tools, will unlock more than 14 trillion USD worldwide annually by 2030. In the specific case of pricing problems-which constitute the class of problems we investigate in this paper-, the estimated unlocked value will be about 0.5 trillion USD per year. In particular, this paper focuses on pricing in e-commerce when the objective function is profit maximization and only transaction data are available. This setting is one of the most common in real-world applications. Our work aims to find a pricing strategy that allows defining optimal prices at different volume thresholds to serve different classes of users. Furthermore, we face the major challenge, common in real-world settings, of dealing with limited data available. We design a two-phase online learning algorithm, namely PVD-B, capable of exploiting the data incrementally in an online fashion. The algorithm first estimates the demand curve and retrieves the optimal average price, and subsequently it offers discounts to differentiate the prices for each volume threshold. We ran a real-world 4-month-long A/B testing experiment in collaboration with an Italian e-commerce company, in which our algorithm PVD-B-corresponding to A configuration-has been compared with human pricing specialists-corresponding to B configuration. At the end of the experiment, our algorithm produced a total turnover of about 300 KEuros, outperforming the B configuration performance by about 55%. The Italian company we collaborated with decided to adopt our algorithm for more than 1,200 products since January 2022.

The new regulations, known as the Internet Information Service Algorithmic Recommendation Management Provisions, have been drafted by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the body that enforces cybersecurity, internet censorship, and e-commerce rules. Terming the new rules as regulations for deep synthesis technology, GAC is implementing them to protect people's legitimate rights and interests. These significant policies are being implemented to ensure more effective services (e.g., ride-hailing, social media) for the country's over 1.4 billion people and manage tech companies and services providers. Artificial Intelligence issues are of concern to China. President Xi Jinping alluded to such challenges in his speech last October, "Some unhealthy and disorderly signals and trends have occurred in the rapid development of our country's digital economy."

Wen Li, a Shanghai marketer in the hospitality industry, first suspected that an algorithm was messing with her when she and a friend used the same ride-hailing app one evening. Wen's friend, who less frequently ordered rides in luxury cars, saw a lower price for the same ride. Wen blamed the company's algorithms, saying they wanted to squeeze more money from her. Chinese ride-hailing companies say prices vary because of fluctuations in traffic. But some studies and news reports claim the apps may offer different prices based on factors including ride history and the phone a person is using. "I mean, come on--just admit you are an internet company and this is what you do to make extra profit," Wen says.

Tinder says it will no longer charge older users more to use Tinder, following a new report questioning the dating app's practice of charging older users "substantially more." The report, from Mozilla and Consumers International, detailed just how much Tinder pricing can vary based on users' age. The report relied on "mystery shoppers" in six countries -- the United States, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Korea, India and Brazil -- who signed up for Tinder and reported back how much the app charged for the subscription. According to the report, Tinder users between the ages of 30 and 49 were charged an average of 65.3 percent more than their younger counterparts in every country except Brazil. Tinder's age-based pricing for Tinder, which gives users access to premium features like unlimited likes, has long been a source of controversy for the dating app.

The invention of price tag took place in the 1870's to maintain the fairness of everybody looking to buy the product they love. Dynamic pricing had always been the norm ever since human history. A century back even the ticket for a cinema was charged less for a matinee screening as compared to the usual popular evening shows. Born out of the '80's, dynamic pricing is now one of the most commonly used marketing techniques by several industries. Anyone old enough will remember the American Airlines' Super Saver fares online commercial where the airline played a major cutthroat with the fares.

Dynamic pricing or price optimization is the concept of offering goods at different prices which varies according to the customer's demand. The pricing of the commodity can be done on the basis of competitor's pricing, supply, demand and conversion rates and sales goals. The practice of Dynamic Pricing is being widely adopted in E-Commerce. Machine learning algorithms should be able to efficiently automate pricing decisions to maximize profits, as they can perform pricing decisions using sophisticated calculations and predictions, by putting all available data into perspective, and change their pricing strategy to best adapt to a dynamic environment. Dynamic pricing, a strategy which enables businesses to provide flexible prices for products and services is now catching on across hospitality, retail, travel and entertainment industry segments.

Autonomous vehicles might negotiate with each other for right of away. You may know the art of the deal, but there's a science to it, too. And artificial intelligence is beginning to learn it. Computers that could negotiate for us could automate and optimize everything from traffic intersections to global treaties. Last month, at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Melbourne, Australia, a group of researchers presented a paper on the challenges and opportunities of such hagglebots.