My parents never advertised their tailor shop, it was all "word-of-mouth" business. After the pricing jack-up, every customer got charged what my mother felt they could pay (with a very loose regard for consistency and some allowance for negotiation).
I used to think that was sketchy. It wasn't until much later that I realized that B2B enterprise sales people do that stuff ALL THE TIME even with their onerous kpi's, forecasting and fiscal quarter expectations!
Depending on how it's done, it still is, and enterprise salesmen doing it doesn't make it less so. As a customer, I don't necessarily seek absolute minimum price, but I want it to be a fair price that I can agree on voluntarily - that means, I don't want to be subject of a bunch of manipulative sales techniques during pricing negotiations. Moreover, individual pricing used at scale makes it impossible to compare prices, or even develop a sense of what price is fair price. I actively prefer buying from vendors who list prices publicly, so by going the individual price route, you might be losing business of me and people like me.
> I don't want to be subject of a bunch of manipulative sales techniques...
There's a reason why sales people in enterprise sales can pull in MM's per year, it's a different level than, say, retail or car sales.
As for dynamic pricing on-line, AFAIK only airlines do that to significant extent so far. Once other people start, I might start opening in different browsers or not keeping cookies or whatever.
I see it like advertising - one part of the chain of value, and ensuring that a responsible and fair transaction occurs
Production: control of how something exists
Project management: control of when something
Advertising: control of how you become aware of something
Pricing: control of how you take ownership of something
I suspect with advertising profiles and amazon purchase histories (and possibly amazon visa card applications requiring household income)... this wonderful "service" previously only available to the rich will be democratized for everyone!
Offering coupons through the mail, online ad codes etc. You are reaching out to different demos using different marketing techniques and offering or not offering discounts accordingly.
The actual paper: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/cbw/static/pdf/imc151-hannak.pdf...
"As shown in Figure 11, Travelocity alters hotel search results for users who browse from iOS devices." (In particular, alters the prices shown to the user).