What Amazon is doing is explained by the article. An ancestor post claimed that it was an effort to find the market-clearing price.
The traditional approach to finding the market-clearing price is to "wobble" it higher or lower and see how that impacts sales. Amazon does do this, along with every other retailer that has ever offered sale prices. You can even see third-party websites that track the price history for a given item.
But that involves changing the price offered to everybody. According to the article, if you anonymize your traffic, such that Amazon does not know exactly who you are, and bring up the same item on both your mobile device and your desktop computer, you will see different prices listed. This shows a clear segmentation of the market, presumably based on the originating IP address being identifiable as from a mobile service provider rather than a traditional wired ISP.
In short, someone said, "But it could have been X," and I said, "No, it couldn't. It is exactly what it appears to be." There was no dig against Amazon, other than my opinion that price discrimination is unethical anti-consumer behavior. You may have a differing opinion about price discrimination, but there should be no doubt that is what they are doing.
The traditional approach to finding the market-clearing price is to "wobble" it higher or lower and see how that impacts sales. Amazon does do this, along with every other retailer that has ever offered sale prices. You can even see third-party websites that track the price history for a given item.
But that involves changing the price offered to everybody. According to the article, if you anonymize your traffic, such that Amazon does not know exactly who you are, and bring up the same item on both your mobile device and your desktop computer, you will see different prices listed. This shows a clear segmentation of the market, presumably based on the originating IP address being identifiable as from a mobile service provider rather than a traditional wired ISP.
In short, someone said, "But it could have been X," and I said, "No, it couldn't. It is exactly what it appears to be." There was no dig against Amazon, other than my opinion that price discrimination is unethical anti-consumer behavior. You may have a differing opinion about price discrimination, but there should be no doubt that is what they are doing.