Imagine shopping online for groceries, a hotel room, or a household appliance and wondering whether the price on your screen is really the same one everyone else sees. Increasingly sophisticated pricing technology can analyze enormous amounts of information and potentially adjust what consumers are offered. When personal information enters that calculation, the practice is commonly called surveillance pricing. The unsettling part is that shoppers may have little way of knowing when their digital behavior is influencing a price or promotion. As companies embrace artificial intelligence, understanding how data-driven pricing works could become an important part of protecting your budget.
