Fabrizio Esposito (CEDIS – Nova School of Law) has posted “Making Personalised Prices Pro-Competitive and Pro-Consumers” (Cahiers Du CeDIE Working Papers 2020/02) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Price personalisation raises four policy concerns: building trust, fostering competitiveness, increasing access, and avoiding exploitation. The Modernisation Directive introduces an information requirement about personalised prices. The research explains how this information requirement can and shall be used to make price personalisation pro-competitive and pro-consumers. The analysis can be divided into two main parts. First, disclosing the impersonal price is the simple and effective way to reap the benefits of price personalisation while counteracting its negative effects. Second, the legal grounds for the right to know also the impersonal price in EU law are identified. After having explained that consumers have a right to be offered a personalised price, it is shown that the principles of transparency and effectiveness in EU consumer law, together with the right granted by Article 22(3) GDPR, imply that consumers have the right to know also the impersonal price. The right to know also the impersonal price is a critical tile for solving the puzzle represented by the best governance of digital markets in the European Union.
Recommended. On the benefits of mandatory disclosure of the past, personalized prices of others, see “The End of Bargaining in the Digital Age.”