They're basically applying enterprise level pricing to a consumer product. You ever try and check the price for a SaaS service only to find that you have to contact them?
They will explain they need answers to a bunch of questions to know if the product is a good fit for you. What they're really trying to do is figure out the max you will pay.
I worked for a company like that. We had one pricing for virtually everyone but our biggest and most prestigious clients. We even used to have it in the clear on the website in the beginning.
It's just that the product was somewhat complicated and the pricing form converted better when it generated leads for the sales team than when casual browsers bounced off it.
it also feels a lot like haggling where knowing the price is key. without knowing what everyone else is paying you don’t know if it’s a good deal or not
I seem to remember articles from lots of sources, I believe Stratechery was one, about a decade ago advocating for this kind of pricing scheme of using analytics to figure out the price that people will pay and charging them that. A lot of the examples was based on income level which of course made me think, hey here I've struggled all my life to get into the middle class and now they want to change up how you pay for things so at the end of the month I can buy the same amount of things and have as much left over as when I was poor.
Anyway I am against it, find it immoral, and think the EU should have some regulations forbidding it.
The report from Mozilla argues that (paraphrasing:) it would be both technically and legally messy to try and regulate the details of pricing algorithms. It is much more feasible to introduce privacy laws so that the use of a consumer's data for personalized pricing is transparent, fair, and lawful. (page 27 of the original report [0])
I feel very cynical about this. The best solution they can come up with is to let the GDPR deal with it? It's hard to believe that unchecking 5 boxes every time I visit a new site truly aligns with their goal of transparency. The researchers suspect that a lot of personalized pricing schemes are in violation of the GDPR, but I just don't know what enforcing compliance will change.
Coincidentally, I just started writing an essay in my ethics class on methods to deal with unethical algorithmic decision making. I'm very happy to discuss this.
How about GDPR 2.0, if PII is involved in personal pricing schemes and you are found to be in violation you will need to inform all of the customers paying higher than your lower rate what you did to them, pay the money back, and have a higher minimum fine and a higher maximum fine.
This is really apparent in their “Top Picks” feature. They give you a list of people the algorithm thinks you will like, but you’re only allowed to check out one of them in free mode. Even though apparently these people are a great match for you they do not show up in the course of regular swiping. Which makes it obvious that Tinder is keeping a holdout set of people it thinks you are compatible with and never shows them to you. Using that app is akin to using a slot machine, and I suspect the algorithms they use for doling out rewards are very similar.
I think you got that wrong. Top Picks appear to be people who are picked the most, not because I would personally like them. Most of the time I like none of them even if they obviously have a “good” profile (sexy photos, no bio)
Funny you say that. When I was using Tinder I assumed that sexy photos and no profile description or bio were bots or scams. I completely ignored them.
Also, if someone can't be bothered to even write a single word. Meh.
They have to strike an interesting balance- enough people have to find romantic success on the app (and tell their friends) to get new users, but not be so successful that too many users stop using the app.
Dating, matchmaking, or even just finding friends, is a perfect problem space that is just ripe for a free service to come and try to solve.
Why isn’t there a free platform for dating? (not counting the subreddits and FB groups for that, because they’re retooling something else, not built from the ground up to solve problems specific to this space).
It’s one of the biggest social issues imo, especially in cultures that restrict or repress dating in meatspace, or places with uneven demographics (e.g. there are literally millions of more men than women out there, which means that many will inevitably “die alone”)
If more people could find a suitable partner or even just compatible friends, it would make the world a much better place, if only by reducing misery (and spurring the economy :)
Why isn’t anyone else stepping in besides the wolves that just prey upon loneliness and desperation?
meetup.com is probably the closest service; although not for dating specifically, meet enough people and sooner or later you'll meet a partner (and if you don't, you usually still have a good time). They don't do a stellar job, but it's okay.
Dating specifically is a pretty difficult problem space because of the creeps, abusers, asynchronicity of the experience of men and women, etc. This is also a problem in non-dating; for example every city where I've attended Couchsurfing meetups there was at least one "creepy guy", and almost every women I've talked to for some length had at least one story.
Plus, it also depends on the "network effect"; why is everyone on Tinder? Because everyone is on Tinder! couchsurfing.com is a badly run platform but none of the alternatives have taken off because there just aren't that many people there.
1) Why would someone build software that sophisticated and not expected to be rewarded for their time and effort? The the amount of skill needed to determine an algorithm good enough to connect people that might be a good match for each isn't a trivial thing that one can pull a library from npm for.
2) How do you attract a large enough user base to make it effective in the first place?
Reddit, Meta, Tiktok, and Alphabet have investors and make much of their own revenue from ads. HN isn't a meet-and-greet site but a discussion forum hosted at the benefaction of YC.
What you're looking for takes enough intelligence to solve and code a solution to the optimal stopping problem, enough money to perpetually host such a system, and enough legal training and patience to comply with the legislative demands of 200 countries. Why shouldn't such a company want to be rewarded in hard currency and no just likes or gratitude?
They are incentivized to maximize engagement just like Tinder. Seems like an awfully ripe place for abuse. Dating should not be handled by a for-profit company.
They did update their pricing as a result of this[0] (article has the same date). Not that I condone their old model, but it's a shame the Mozilla article wasn't updated given their call to action is unnecessary.
How does this work with the thing in iOS where you can just go to settings and change to any available subscription without going through the app UI? Don’t you have to give iTunes Connect the list of all subscription tiers and prices?
I believe old OkCupid data (which has since been deleted from their blog) found exactly this.
In short, males looking for females are very even in their rating of women along a bell curve. Females looking for males heavily skew towards the top 20% of males, while considering the bottom 80% "below average".
Tinder, and every other dating app, absolutely take advantage of this deep truth of human psychology and milk the bottom echelon of desperate men for every penny they can.
Take that OkCupid stuff with a grain of salt. While I am sure there are general trends that are true, OkCupid didn't isolate the characteristic they were testing.
So their stats were just a crude measure.
If half the profiles are just a no-brainer "no" then the "real average" is only over the top 50% rather than the full 100%.
I don't deny that using these apps as a man is a more difficult experience in actually landing a date, but many women are also frustrated by the tons of crappy/creepy men out there (e.g. "dickpics" and such). Being in the "top 30/20%" is easier than you'd might think.
The biggest challenge is that Tinder can be an emotional rollercoaster and really screw over your self-esteem.
> If half the profiles are just a no-brainer "no" then the "real average" is only over the top 50% rather than the full 100%.
You're doing a lot of mental gymnastics to redefine terms like "average". Ah yes, it is perfectly fine for women to consider 80% of men to be below average in attractiveness, because those 80% are just a no-brainer "no" because they are not attractive and math is hard.
> I don't deny that using these apps as a man is a more difficult experience in actually landing a date, but many women are also frustrated by the tons of crappy/creepy men out there (e.g. "dickpics" and such). Being in the "top 30/20%" is easier than you'd might think.
Perhaps you are in the top 20% of men so you feel that it is easy to be in the top 20% bracket, but men who are not up there don't really have a path to get there. You imply that men should simply stop sending dick picks (and stop doing other, very obviously bad things), but the proportion of men sending unwarranted dick pics is vanishingly small.
All I'm saying is that "average" isn't really all that meaningful here (as it isn't in many cases). For example, the number of men who have just one or two badly lit photos from their webcam is staggering. That's just a no-brainer.
> All I'm saying is that "average" isn't really all that meaningful here (as it isn't in many cases). For example, the number of men who have just one or two badly lit photos from their webcam is staggering. That's just a no-brainer.
You're missing the point. The major finding in that OkCupid post was that (according to that post) women have an unrealistic expectation of the attractiveness of men. They demonstrated this by showing that the majority of women consider the majority of men to be below average in attractiveness. This claim is not refuted by your observation that some men send unwanted dick picks, and it's not refuted by your observation that some men use badly lit photos. I don't know why you feel like these observations somehow refute this claim? Even if 100% of men were sending dick pics and 100% of men were using badly lit photos, this still wouldn't change the fact that 1+1=2, or the fact that top 50% of men in terms of attractiveness are above the median in terms of attractiveness. If a person holds a world view to the contrary, their world view is factually incorrect.
I think you guys are both in agreement. If half the profiles are, say, 0 out of 10, then there's no way the average could be > 5. I mean, that's just math. I don't understand dropping all values less than the median to get a "real average". It's absolutely possible that women rate 80% as below average--that just indicates a huge number of zeros or huge unimodal distribution towards the low end of the range.
I've been married for a long time so thankfully don't need to use Tinder, but this reported rating distribution squares with my memory of the dating market in meatspace. 90% of women go after the top 20% of the guys. Online probably doesn't change this.
I'm actually surprised that dating apps aren't doing more with monetization opportunities. There are plenty of whales out there who would be happy to deploy their disposable income for mating opportunities. Why not let someone spend $1000 a day to be the top displayed profile in a city for an entire day?
There are "dating" sites that specialize in connecting wealthy/successful people (mostly older men) with young, beautiful people (mostly women). They do charge quite a bit and make bank.
I’m wealthy enough to pay for these kinds of services, but never tried them, as I find sex with women who just want me for my money boring / a haggle between the amount of money a girl wants to extract from me vs the amount of sex I want to have with her. The more I experienced this, the more I realized that it’s better to do 2 hours of sports a day (1 hour running and 1 hour gym, while dieting).
The Jeff Bezos / Leonardo DiCaprio scene clearly shows that money can’t buy sexual attraction.
I'm not an expert at that particular area, but my anecdotal impression was that high-end matchmaking services (say 50-100k to find a life partner) were fairly underwhelming. Or are you talking about the whole sugar dating world here?
I don't think that's apples-to-apples though. Sugar dating is typically transactional and typically doesn't lead to genuine connection and relationships, whereas most datings apps are about something more than an occasional hookup, including Tinder (see the millions of "not here for a hookup" statements in womens' profiles that have been there for years).
Depending on your circles - it still is. Common enough on many dating subreddits, blind, and plenty of other places that would consider this data backed analysis to be “incel theory”.
It mostly has to do with the gender ratio. If there are women on there (common enough on many forums) or any guys who’ve never experienced any amount of sustained sexual frustration (uncommon but happens) - the incel talks start coming out. Mostly due to willful ignorance on their part.
Not sure about that one. Loads of evidence came out about Trump voters filling out ballots for dead relatives and republican-funded recounts coming out with results less favorable for them. You won't lose your job talking about the truth--nobody cares.
1. It isn't obvious to me that dating for older people is to be treated as the same service as dating for younger people. There are profound differences. Dating as a 20 year old female is a completely different situation to dating as a 40 year old of either gender.
2. Even if it is the same service, what is the problem with Tinder charging some people an extra $20? This isn't an essential service in any way.
3. foundation.mozilla.org ? Why is the Mozilla foundation of all groups investing time into this sort of advocacy?
> Even if it is the same service, what is the problem with Tinder charging some people an extra $20? This isn't an essential service in any way.
I am not a lawyer, but I do know age is a protected class in the US. It could be seen as age based discrimination. My understanding is that protected classes are the same criteria we use to, for example make it illegal to have a separate price for different races.
Though sex is also a protected class and plenty of establishments have preferential rates for ladies nights, so I am not sure how black and white the law really is here; that particular issue has a pretty back-and-forth history as far as I can tell, and maybe this would similarly have some kind of carve out? Definitely seems like a very large legal risk.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies%27_night#:~:text=Ladi....
The civil rights act, the ADA only apply to "public accommodations". Many country clubs are not open to the public, they won't provide services to non members and aren't covered by the laws that make discrimination based on age or other classes unlawful.
Returning to the thought, one obvious argument for the theater would be that, since they're giving preferential pricing to other people who are also over 40, they are not discriminating against you based on your membership in the protected class. But that would still seem to leave them open to a claim that you should be given the child's pricing as soon as you turn 40.
Tinder doesn't sell dating. I'm not sure exactly what their product is, but its more to do with self-worth, impulse control and sexual gratification - even if some of their matches do produce relationships.
The predatory monetization scheme makes more sense in that context.
I am equally surprised, but it's still in line with their manifesto. Excerpt:
> We are committed to an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth — where a person’s demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities, or quality of experience.
If your phone is a recent or expensive model, the subscription prices for apps may be higher, or the discounts lower, because you presumably have more disposable income.
Tinder is so extremely effective that it's almost certainly underpriced at all of these levels purely because of perception. I only had gold once and bought a couple of boosts but for over two months I would fill my calendar with 2-4 dates a week at something close to Spotify sub ($20/mo iirc).
There is no other way to meet women this efficiently. And it was a lot of fun, too. It took out all the slog out of dating. It would be a steal at $100/mo.
I also expected a certain kind of woman and was suprised how varied users on Tinder were. Of course there were quite a few women with extensive dating experience and, let's say, Instagram tastes (not that there's anything wrong with that) but I also met a very sweet vet who kept sending me dog vids from her clinic, a movie production nerd (making them, not memorizing imdb), a depressive poet with a keen sense of style, and an MD for whom this was like a third real first date in her life.
Occasionally, the photos were a bit old (pre-pandemic) or very flattering, one might have been a tad unstable, but in general, they were just normal and nice.
This is very misleading. The experience for overwhelming majority of men is quite the opposite. You have to be really good looking to be successful on Tinder; that's what it boils down to. For the >90% of blokes Tinder is a scam.
Any discrimination based on any ground such as sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation shall be prohibited.
Not a Tinder user or investor, but this makes me curious. Why is it okay for insurance companies to sell me products with hyper-personalized pricing (often based on sex, age, and race), but it's not okay for Tinder or other tech companies to do so?
Because it’s based on regulated actuarial science, not explicit bias.
Marketing methods are often a little more fuzzy and less ethical than the actual underwriting. Insurers and marketers know about all sort of stuff that affects insurability, from eating habits, to gun ownership, to participation in high risk activity.
I don’t necessarily understand what Tinder does precisely, but it’s pretty obvious that you can exploit the insecurity or desperation of people looking for dates. It’s gonna be easier to extract cash from a 45 year old divorced woman than a 25 year old single woman. And you may want to use tolls as a friction point to reduce the number of undesirable or less profitable men.
You can probably use willingness to pay as a factor to score matches that will generate more churn that keeps the subscription in place. Generally speaking, I expect the most evil imaginable from companies like this. Online dating is a real mill, especially when you pass the threshold where you’re not attached and most people in your cohort are.
Insurance companies are supposed to increase the price t relative to the risk. So if you’re paying double the premium than someone else for car insurance, it’s because they have some data to suggest that you’re twice as, “risky.”
In the US, at least, you actually need to to get pre-approval for your prices and how you arrive at that price, and that information becomes public record.
>In the US, at least, you actually need to to get pre-approval for your prices and how you arrive at that price, and that information becomes public record.
But some factors get a free pass whereas others don't. eg. age/sex is allowed, but race/income/education isn't (although zip codes approximate some of those, to an extent).
It varies based on state though. In California, insurers are legally prohibited from using race, sex or zip code in pricing. It's supposed to be strictly based on age, vehicle type and claims history, although I have no doubt that insurers do their best to get around that.
(Side note, in the lead up to the restriction on how insurers could base their premiums, there was a failed initiative in the 90s that would have made California a no-fault state and would handle funding insurance through a surcharge on gasoline prices.)
In NZ, car insurance companies openly use location, gender and age in pricing.
Men under 25 pay the highest premiums due to their repeated statistically demonstrated tendency to take far more risks and accordingly have far more serious accidents.
(And good luck getting full insurance if you're male, under 25 and own a vehicle with a turbo.)
Likewise, women 30+ get lower premiums than men because while they have more fender benders, they have far less serious crashes - and our insurance companies proudly advertise to women on that basis.
And your car premium will vary based on your location's car theft rates, although how you store your car (garage vs. driveway vs. street parking) and installed antitheft devices will reduce it.
However, race based pricing is very much not a thing.
It probably could be, as a proxy for socio-economic status, as the indigenous people of NZ are over-represented in all negative socio-economic indicators, thanks to colonisation followed by about a century of government policy, some deliberate (e.g., Tohunga Suppression Act 1907), some accidental (Manpower Act 1944).
And poor young men are even more at risk of serious accident than other young men.
That said, as no insurer will pay out if your car didn't have a current warrant of fitness (proof that your car meets minimum safety regulations), or current registration (just a tax, used to fund road maintenance and our no-fault accident insurance scheme), that effectively discriminates against poor people anyway.
Incidentally, NZ doesn't have compulsory third party insurance.
And I strongly support that - making it compulsory only benefits insurance companies by reducing their risk (which they aren't compelled to pass on to customers as lower premiums), and because once something is mandatory, you can charge far more than is fair, and people can't respond like a rational market would by just not buying your service.
I used to teach LaTeX classes for the TeX Users Group starting when I was in college up until my mid 20s (so roughly 1989–1994). It was very challenging to find companies that would rent cars to me when I would travel to various locations to teach.
Insurance premiums are based on massive tables of probable risks.
E.g., I'm a redhead living in the Southern Hemisphere who has been active in the outdoors all my life and who smoked for 30 years.
So to get insurance that paid out in the event of terminal illness, I had to either pay a massive premium, or agree to exclude melanoma and lung cancer.
Makes sense - redheads produce minimal melanin, and there is far more UV exposure in the Southern Hemisphere due to the ozone "hole" that forms over Antarctica every year and drifts north onto southern South America / southern Africa / Australia / New Zealand. So as a ginger who had spent a lot of time outdoors under a harsher sun, I'm definitely in one of the rows in that actuarial table that's coloured red in Excel.
(And smoking is self-evident).
Now, back to Tinder. Are they charging based on risk? No.
They're charging what people will pay. And I'm willing to bet that they consider a recently divorced 48 year old man is able to pay more, and if I'm being uncharitable, desperate enough to do so.
So your comparison is very much apples and oranges.
Considering their size, their pricing is probably also based on data. They probably know scaringly well how big the ”risk” of you finding love is, and can price services accordingly
It’s not the exit risk, it’s ”how likely are you to be desperate”. And they have real-time data on it, they know how long the average user views your profile, how often you match, etc
I don't really have skin in the game (never used Tinder) but I would guess a combination of transparency and competition is what makes personalized pricing feel "fair".
It's well-known that insurance rates vary a lot from person to person (transparency) _and_ there's multiple insurance companies offering what's effectively the same service (competition). So, if I don't like the price, I can get my car/house/boat insured with someone else who will likely give me a different personalized price.
In this case Tinder seems to be working hard to keep the magnitude of the pricing variance secret and there's no real competition since Tinder's apps are the only way to access the service.
Because sex, age, and race are statistically significant factors in how much the insurance companies will pay out for each demographic.
Personalized pricing for a digital service with a more-or-less constant cost-per-user doesn't make sense here (unless you want to maximize profits by unfairly discriminating against certain demographics).
What’s this “unfair” crap? We’re talking about dating and mating. Apart from war there may be no human activity in which fairness applies less. Price discrimination in dating apps is as problematic as in airline tickets. Twenty year old men moan about actually having to try and ask people out if they want a date. Thirty five year old women complain that they can’t find someone who loves them for their career accomplishments or how superficial men their age are, dating women 10 years hone younger. Dating sucks unless you’re a young woman looking for casual sex or an attractive, solvent (young) man who wants to get married.
I don't know what you're going on about, but this "crap" was in reference to increasing price without offering something in return. If a store sold a woman an specific item for 5x the price they offer to men, they would be sued for discrimination. Unless serving certain demographics costs tinder more (thereby justifying the increase the price), it is objectively unfair and discriminatory. End of story.
The “crap” you’re talking about is the idea that fairness has a place in mating. The thing that justifies tinder charging different groups of people different prices is that they want to and if people don’t want to buy they don’t have to. It’s the same rationale by which tiers of software services that differ in their cost to the provider by little or nothing differ in their cost to the buyer by orders of magnitude. If you don’t want to buy don’t.
If discrimination by gender or other relevant characteristic was illegal in the US that might have some legal, not moral bearing, but no one cares.
> In the United States, a few states have adopted statutes forbidding gender-based price discrimination, but these policies are largely unenforced.
> Apart from war there may be no human activity in which fairness applies less.
Agreed, which is why it was a big collective fuckup for Western societies to migrate from the societies where premarital and extramarital sex was condemned, thus ensuring a far more even distribution of sexual access for men and women.
>Is that 'unfairly discriminating against a certain demographic'?
I suspect it gets a free pass because the demographic being discriminated against is better off (eg. adults who tend to have more disposable income). If it were the other way around (eg. software companies charging elderly people more because they don't know any better), there's going to be more backlash.
It's not that they're better-off, but rather that the movie theater discovered that a movie the child wants to see often forces the parents with them. By discounting the child, they increased the sale of at least 1 ticket for the parent, and therefore, they make more money. If the child wasn't discounted, the parent might choose an alternative source of entertainment (because face it, adults tend not to want to watch children movies) and the theater lose out on that adult ticket!
this is why you don't see a discount for couples usually - coz they were going to pay even without the discount.
Insurance is often highly regulated as to what they can do price discrimination on, oftentimes limited to things which directly impacts the cost of that insurance, like age (side note, I don't believe race is legally part of that). Tinder, on the other hand, presumably doesn't have any differing costs per customer and has no generally agreed-upon guidelines as to what kind of discrimination is okay.
If you think about it, it's kind of weird for a product to have a single price. Everyone who would pay more is paying less.[1] It's much more profitable to just barely meet demand for every one while keeping the lower bound at the cost of production. You're right to point out that insurance operates with price discrimination. Student discounts and senior discounts are another common example. There are many others.[2] Tinder has market power in the sense that they sell access to a unique user base. Sure, their competitors offer access too, but none are identical, and that difference implies an amount of exclusivity.
That’s not an arbitrary pricing on how much they think you can afford, this is (excluding sleazy one) based on risk profile where age is one of the attributes that changes the risk profile
My answer to that question is that the cost of the insurance varies based on demographics (you didn't mention the biggest variables like driving record, vehicle type, loan/lein and collision) while the Tinder service cost is basically the same for all users.
The most sense it makes for Tinder to do is to chage men more than women, which they already did.
Insurance cost is determined based on actuarial tables, whereas Tinder probably doesn't even consider the size of anyones table.
Insurance price varies according to how likely you are to use their services, and how expensive these services are likely to be. A 95-year-old with high blood pressure and a history of cancer is potentially more expensive than a healthy 25-year-old. That's entirely different from how an app like Tinder operates.
You get to see people who have "liked" you, so you can like them back directly. For guys, who generally get *nowhere near* the number of likes as women, this can help them find people that actually want to meet them.
Or, they could use one of those automated finger-swiping things, like some guys tend to do.
Tinder’s parent Match is part of the coalition against Apple’s control over In-app Purchase payment system, very likely because they want to circumvent Apple’s customer-friendly refund process when an app rips them off.
Disclaimer: I think Tinder is a rent-extracting garbage app, BUT, philosophically speaking, why is dynamic pricing unfair? If the algorithm detects that based on your biography, location and usage patterns, you would keep using this service even if it charged you 5x as much, isn't that just the market becoming more efficient?
You mean a company becoming more efficient at extracting money from their un-informed customers. A company finding new ways to leverage their market power, position, and information asymmetry.
Products aren't priced based on value, but on the maximum a customer will pay. A free market identifies the value of a product through competition between different sellers of the product.
Tinder is entitled to charge as much as they want to whoever they want as long as they're not discriminating against a protected class.
The free market resolution requires competition, though. There might be a reasonable case to be made that products that don't have comparable competition can't be priced in a way that exploits different customers by charging more for receiving the same service or good?
I don't think there's anything comparable to tinder that found be considered legitimate competition- match.com, Madison, adult friend finder, etc are operating in very different markets with very different tools and expectations.
> There might be a reasonable case to be made that products that don't have comparable competition can't be priced in a way that exploits different customers by charging more for receiving the same service or good?
Price discrimination[1] relies on market power. This is a completely uncontroversial thing. Any discussion on price discrimination will tie back to market power.
1. Not a judgement here. This is a technical term from microeconomics.
It can be proven that they work perfectly, i.e. cannot be improved on, under certain strong conditions. They work less than perfectly otherwise. But most markets are never near those conditions and empirically work quite well for the set of thick, widely traded markets with good[1] information.
Match group (which owns many of the major dating apps) definitely performs anti-competitive and borderline illegal behavior. But tinder is far from a monopoly. The fact that they own 22 dating app companies is testament to how easy it is to break into that market.
It’s a testament as to how easy to break in. It is not a testament as to how easy it is to turn a profit. These companies get bought by match because they’re not super profitable and able to compete until end of time against match.
To be fair, it's hard to expect to make much of a profit when there are 22 companies out there already selling the same exact product. Online dating is pretty much dead as a direction for new startups to pursue, one big red ocean at this point, and there's no clever play left in it that would set a new players in the space apart.
I don't see how consolidation into a couple of major players swallowing most of the companies in the space is avoidable. It's Booking Holdings vs Expedia Group all over again.
"fairness" is an interesting concept in commerce of any kind, which seems to be more prevalent in the US than elsewhere.[1]
If one thinks of commerce as "willing buyer,willing seller" then a transaction occurs at the point where both sides are content with the money/product swap. What other people paid for the same product is only tangentially relevant - if I'm happy with the transaction today why should I be less happy tomorrow based on someone else's transaction?
Outside the US you see this in places where markets are more fluid, and in some places have no pricing at all. You are expected to haggle (I mean, negotiate) - failure to do so makes a fool of the vendor to offer first too low a price.
In other words, the world is unfair. Sometimes in your favour, sometimes against. The sooner one accepts that the easier life becomes..
Equally though unfairness creates a gap in the market. Girls toys cost more than boys toys (same toy, different package) suggests an opportunity.
[1] for the purposes of this discussion I'm not talking about protected classes, such as race. There are some unfairness that are considered to be unacceptable.
> if I'm happy with the transaction today why should I be less happy tomorrow based on someone else's transaction?
jealousy. Even animal studies have shown that monkeys who sees another monkey receive more reward for the same "work" gets angry (i recall it was some experiment where one monkey got "paid" in grapes, while another was paid in something else less desirable - i forgot what - and initially both were happy, as they did not see each other's payment, but once the monkey saw the grape reward, they refused their reward and got angry).
This is a useful strategy. If the other monkey is getting paid in grapes and you're getting feed pellets, why shouldn't you make a play for an equally good reward?
Obviously there are cases where you'll never get the grapes, but that's why we have executive function.
I don’t think dynamic pricing is per se unfair. But I do find it a bit misleading when it’s presented as static pricing, i.e. “The price for Tinder gold is X” as opposed to “The price we will charge you for Tinder gold is X”. Folks might make different decisions if they were aware.
Some services give discounts to students without removing any features. Is that bad, since all the other customers are getting the same service but have to pay more for it?
Nope. I don't have an issue with price discrimination if those being favored are given a price bellow the baseline that everyone else gets. That is not what's happening here. Tinder is charging certain people more than other for no reason other than who they are.
If Tinder wants to overcharge certain demographics, they have to do it to the majority or offer something of equivalent value to them in return.
To play the devil's advocate, could you not argue that this is more equitable? People of greater means pay more for the service, and keep the lights on for the less fortunate who still get to enjoy a well-funded product?
An efficient market isn't necessarily the goal of human life, and a free market can be "bad." Nothing substantive to contribute to a detailed discussion otherwise, but keep this in mind.
It may not be unfair, but is certainly undermining market dynamics. Normally, the price is fenced by multiple factors involving the entire spectrum of that particular market segment. With undisclosed personal pricing, prices aren't fenced anymore by known factors and the market isn't "well informed" anymore (if you believe in such things). We may think that being subjected to an essentially uninformed market may be deemed as unfair.
you seem to mistake market efficiency for abuse of an asymmetry. If anything, allowing abuse of an asymmetry leads to decrease in efficiency. They don't need better service if they can just extract more from you for the same service.
The part I don't understand though is why this is a problem. If you think the price of the service is too high, move on to a competitor. I did once I saw how much they were going to charge me this year. Hinge/Bumble are a much better ROI at this moment, and Tinder lost a long time paying customer. That's the market at work.
> If you think the price of the service is too high, move on to a competitor.
It's a problem because it puts consumers at an even further disadvantage in a game that's already stacked against them. That you're still willing to pay makes no difference - you're still worse off than before.
Maybe it would be somewhat fair if consumers had their own well-funded departments, studying corporations to determine the lowest price they'd still be willing to sell a product for, and then collectively negotiating the price.
But we don't, and it would be a waste of humanity's limited time to play these zero-sum, when we can just make the behavior illegal.
Uber does the same thing. I noticed this one time when a friend was asking for the same ride. He has a basic credit card and i have a platinum amex card. My ride was 40% higher for the same trip
Why would it not be? I’m not trying to be snarky. Under what law would that be illegal? Charging different people different prices for the same thing is perfectly legal so long as it’s not due to that person being a member of a protected class (race, sex, etc.).
Certain cards are very popular with certain demographics.
I would not do something as stupid using cards to discriminate pricing.
Now of course, we live in a society where the courts would never actually make that link, so you can argue I'd be a bad leader leaving money on the table like that...
But I'd say that's more a problem with our system than anything.
I'm pretty sure it is more than that. I mentioned in a comment below this one that they probably use my destinations as a proxy to asses my income and how much I'm willing to pay for a ride
People have been accusing Uber of this ever since it started and Uber has categorically denied that it's doing this [1] "We may price routes differently based on our understanding of demand patterns, not individual riders."
And this entire time, nobody has generated definitive proof that this is happening which is a photo of two phones side by side going to the same location listing different prices despite how easy such proof would be to generate.
It's the same as the whole "Yelp deletes reviews if you don't buy ads" or "Facebook is listening to your microphone and serving you up ads". Proof is easy to generate and yet it never appears, only endlessly more anecdotes and speculation.
I did a Google search and Forbes and other sites goes into this matter.
I could say the same thing about you and that you deny it because you somehow benefits from it.
But in any case I still use it because I find it useful regardless of this custom pricing
It could but it was the other way around though. He requested after me so we used his ride instead. I guess the demand went down after I requested it? who knows
This will likely become more normal over time. No one really cares because it’s mostly men who are losing their money. And rich men aren’t often on these apps - so it’s only the working class that is losing. So, working class men are getting screwed over by a corporation? No, you don’t say.
Price discrimination is illegal if it's on the basis of gender, race, religion, or nationality. Tinder isn't charging men more however - just older people.
It's unlikely age-based price discrimination will ever be made illegal, because it would effectively outlaw senior discounts.
They will explain they need answers to a bunch of questions to know if the product is a good fit for you. What they're really trying to do is figure out the max you will pay.