Skip to content

Top Best Ask Show New Jobs

Detecting price discrimination while shopping online

8 pointskwisatzh13y ago6 comments

Hi All,

We've developed a browser extension to help detect if you are a victim of price discrimination while buying stuff online.

The extension can be found at: http://pdexperiment.cba.upc.edu/

Feedback more than welcome. Thanks much!

6 comments

5 comments · 2 top-level

jcr13y ago· 2 in thread

Thanks to Jakub Mikians for making his paper available.

I'm curious if you're doing real-time currency conversion?

kwisatzhOP13y ago

Very welcome! Thanks for the comment -- currently no. The system we have in place shows you prices as found from different locations -- so if you search from the US you will be shown prices in $$ and if you search from say Brazil, you will see prices in Reals. We can add the conversion as a feature.

jcr13y ago

I should have mentioned it, but I think "real-time" would be overkill (i.e. live forex quotes), but generally recent currency exchange rates are easy to get.

Also, the variance in shipping costs and sales tax/vat are additional way to help improve comparison accuracy, but getting this right is a whole lot of work, and worse, keeping it up to date is painful.

Another consideration would be how various browsers are being faked. If you're spoofing by using a modified user-agent, then the spoof is detectable through javascript. Getting past this could be done either through virtualization or creating a modified client/browser to better emulate the target browser.

It's a great project, and I'm looking forward to reading though your code.

10dpd13y ago· 1 in thread

Do you mean 'price discrimination' or 'yield management'?

kwisatzhOP13y ago

Price discrimination -- the ability to tailor prices according to your willingness to pay. The willingness to pay can conceivably be extracted using your browsing information. Yield management is a type of PD but it doesn't use personal information.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse