Price discrimination, setting the price of a given product for each customer individually according to his valuation for it, can benefit from extensive information collected online on the customers and thus contribute to the profitability of e-commerce services. Another way to discriminate among customers with different willingness to pay is to steer them towards different sets of products when they search within a product category (i.e., search discrimination). Our main contribution in this paper is to empirically demonstrate the existence of signs of both price and search discrimination on the Internet, and to uncover the information vectors used to facilitate them. Supported by our findings, we outline the design of a large-scale, distributed watchdog system that allows users to detect discriminatory practices.

Peer Reviewed