The world is too loud. Read what matters.

Masters in Business 2026-10-14

In the same store at the same moment, your eggs might cost 23% more than the person next to you

Algorithms have broken the old mechanism where comparison shopping kept prices in check: RealPage's software lets thousands of landlords coordinate rent increases without meeting, and Instacart quietly charges different prices for the same products based on customer identity.

Price discriminationAlgorithmic collusionSurveillance pricingAntitrustE-commerceRental housing

A 25-minute interview packed with case studies: RealPage, Walmart patents, Delta Air Lines, Instacart experiments—each backed by specific numbers, no filler.

The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it

Pricing has become a discipline of algorithmic engineering, not retail intuition

Lindsay Owens explains that pricing used to be simple: calculate cost, add profit, print a label, done. Now companies hire pricing consultants, physicists, and acquire AI firms outright—all to precisely engineer extraction from consumers' wallets. Her new book Gouged catalogs the old pricing tricks now amplified by technology.

— Lindsay Owens

Algorithms enable price coordination among competitors who never meet

Price-fixing used to require gathering rivals in a room, with constant risk of defection—affordable only in oligopolies with few players. But in rental housing, with thousands of landlords, RealPage's YieldStar software does the coordinating: landlords share unit type, amenities, pricing; the software suggests rent levels; many default to accepting them. The Department of Justice filed price-fixing charges in late 2024 after a federal raid on an Atlanta developer.

— Lindsay Owens

Seventy-five percent industry concentration provides fertile ground for pricing manipulation

Owens notes that 75% of US industries are more concentrated today than a generation ago. This consolidation creates conditions for hidden pricing: if consumers can easily cross the street for a cheaper alternative, companies can't easily exploit them. But as competition shrinks and comparison shopping becomes impossible—because prices vary by person—algorithmic pricing techniques flourish.

— Lindsay Owens

Retailers price-discriminate based on your car and shopping behavior

Owens catalogs data companies already collect or are trying to collect: Walmart filed a patent analyzing before-and-after vehicle suspension images to infer purchase weight; firms track children's ages to time product-recommendation ads; e-commerce sites use IP address to estimate regional household income; Expedia charged different prices for the same hotel room depending on location-inferred visitor income. Walmart's 2023 patent is explicit: when connected e-scan checkout detects tuna in a shopping cart, the mayonnaise price for that same cart rises.

— Lindsay Owens

Companies tell investors, patent offices, and consumers completely different stories

Owens' organization reviewed Delta Air Lines' investor earnings calls and found Delta discussing its arrangement with Israeli AI firm Fetcher to raise ticket prices. Delta initially gave Fetcher control over 1% of ticket pricing; seeing results, it scaled to 20% by year-end. Corporations maintain three separate narratives: one for shareholders, one for the patent office, one for the public.

— Lindsay Owens

One shopping cart, one store, one moment—but prices differ by 23%

Owens' organization and Consumer Reports recruited 400 volunteers to visit the same Instacart pickup location at the same time with 23 identical items in their carts and take screenshots. Nearly 75% of products showed different prices, with gaps reaching 23%—translating to roughly $1,200 per year in extra costs for an average household. After media coverage, Instacart's stock fell; the FTC and New York's attorney general both opened investigations; two weeks later, Instacart pledged same-time same-place same-price.

— Lindsay Owens

Calls to redistribute wealth through pricing don't describe what companies actually do

When companies defend personalized pricing by saying ‘we charge wealthy areas more and low-income areas less, for equity,’Owens calls this ‘corporate Robin Hoodism’and disputes it. The actual strategy is to extract the maximum from every person—low-income segments get squeezed less, not spared. Willingness to pay doesn't track income anyway: a parent rushing to a funeral or buying fever medicine for a sick child will exceed their income-suggested price ceiling; companies will eventually learn to capture these emotional moments.

— Lindsay Owens

AI shopping agents gaining wallet control raises unknown consumer risks

Owens reflects that the internet and e-commerce once promised transparency and buyer leverage, yet the reality exposed in this book is the opposite—technologies introduced opacity and manipulation, breaking earlier promises. Next comes agentic commerce and AI shopping assistants. Meta's Muse, for instance, claims to cancel unwanted subscriptions for users. But new risks follow: What data will these agents see? Once an AI agent can directly withdraw from your account, will the outcome be consumer-beneficial or not? No one yet knows.

— Lindsay Owens

In their own words · checked verbatim

Today, pricing is a highly engineered science. Companies hire armies of pricing consultants. They hire physicists.

Lindsay Owens2:10

it would have been hard to put together a price fixing scheme. But now there's software for that.

Lindsay Owens6:14

by some estimates, RealPage's impacts on rental markets could be as much as like $ 120 a month.

Lindsay Owens8:20

75% of industries more concentrated now than they were a generation ago

Lindsay Owens10:25

They filed for a 2023 patent that did exactly what you described, used Scan and Go technology. connected to electronic shelf labels to track what you were already buying, say tuna fish.

Lindsay Owens14:30

they initially gave this AI company 1% of their fares to muck around with. And they like what they saw. So by the end of the year, they were going to give it 20% of their fares to muck around with.

Lindsay Owens18:38

those differences were as high as 23%. So you could be charged 23% more than me for a dozen eggs at the same Safeway grocery store in Washington, D.C. at the exact same time.

Lindsay Owens20:39

What will happen when an AI agent has access to your wallet? Will that be good or bad? You decide.

Lindsay Owens24:44

Figures

RealPage's impact on estimated rent	Up to approximately $120 per month	8:20
Industry concentration change	75% of industries more concentrated than a generation ago	10:25
Instacart price variation coverage	Nearly 75% of items have different prices	20:39
Instacart maximum price difference	23%, roughly $1,200 per year for average household	20:39
Delta-Fetcher partnership scope change	From 1% to 20% of ticket pricing	18:38
Walmart tuna-mayo patent expiration	Through 2039	15:33

Glossary

Surveillance pricing: Companies use consumer data to personalize prices for different people
Dynamic pricing: Continuously adjusting product or service prices based on real-time data
Revenue management system: Pricing software that forecasts demand and auto-generates price recommendations
Electronic shelf labels: Internet-connected price tags that can be remotely updated in real time
Agentic commerce: AI agents autonomously making purchasing decisions and payments on behalf of users

How to listen

Who it's for

If you shop online and compare prices, are renting or negotiating rent, or care about antitrust and consumer protection.