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Detecting price discrimination while shopping online

8 points by kwisatzh ↗ HN
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

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jcr
Thanks to Jakub Mikians for making his paper available.

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

kwisatzh
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.
jcr
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.

kwisatzh
Yes we are indeed spoofing the UA and you are quite right that it is easy to circumvent this. This is a first step and our intention is to have more people use this and give us feedback so that we can make it better. Thanks much for your very helpful suggestions and comments.
10dpd
Do you mean 'price discrimination' or 'yield management'?
kwisatzh
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.