Given the rapid rise of AI and its capacity to help firms customize consumer prices, price personalization has become a hot topic at the intersection of business ethics and technology studies. This article challenges the argument that price personalization would increase social welfare, addressing the claim that firms should charge more to people with greater willingness-to-pay (WTP), and less to people with lower WTP, because this will boost social welfare. I develop two reasons for doubt. First, preferences that influence WTP often do not conduce to consumers’ well-being. So, adjusting prices to preference-based WTP will not necessarily enhance social welfare. Second, firms’ long-term strategic agendas will often disfavor increased price personalization. If “ought implies can,” firms can morally be expected to do only what they reasonably can in competitive conditions.

A recent federal policy will close a regulatory loophole created by the 2018 Farm Bill and restrict the sale of intoxicating hemp-derived tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) beverages in the United States. Given the sector’s popularity among U.S. adults, it is useful to quantify the anticipated reductions in consumer welfare from the impending policy change. This study uses utility estimates from previously published experimental research on consumers’ alcohol and cannabis preferences to calculate the change in compensating variation resulting from removing hemp-derived THC beverages from the marketplace. The results suggest that banning hemp-derived THC beverages is associated with a consumer welfare reduction of \$3.32 per individual, per choice occasion. Though this may appear modest, scaling this result nationally yields an annualized, scenario-based consumer welfare reduction ranging from \$112 to \$146 million. These results provide timely insights into an evolving regulatory environment that can inform policymakers and industry groups on the potential implications of the market change.

This paper investigates the effects on consumer welfare of changing food-at-home (FAH) and food-away-from-home (FAFH) prices in a period that witnessed two major economic shocks: the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent abnormal inflation. Even though FAFH prices increased more than FAH during this period, we find that FAH price increases have led to more significant and volatile welfare losses compared to changes in FAFH prices. The article makes two contributions to the literature. First, using a complete demand system that is comprised of nine expenditure categories, including FAH, FAFH, and seven other broad non-food aggregates, we estimate the household welfare losses in consumer surplus from changing prices of FAH and FAFH incorporating the own- and cross-price effects. Our findings reveal that own-price effects dominate welfare losses with negligible cross effects, resulting in 11.2% and 7% losses in consumer welfare from FAH and FAFH price increases, respectively, as a percentage of total food spending after the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, the dominance of the own price effects suggests that the easier-to-estimate conditional demand systems (foods only) may be sufficient for conducting welfare analysis of changes in food prices.

This Article examines dynamic pricing on Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven platforms through a theoretical framework. It explores how AI enables platforms to engage in first-degree price discrimination, allowing them to perpetually impose “consumer-surplus-exhausting prices” based on personalized data—a significant shift from pre-AI price differentiation toward a more systemic and actual discrimination. This raises concerns about consumer welfare, as AI-driven dynamic pricing may eventually lead to worse outcomes than traditional monopolies, with full consumer surplus extraction despite competitive transaction volumes. In addition, this Article introduces the concept of multiple platforms in the same relevant market functioning as an “AI-driven de facto single entity.” It also explores consumers’ “profiling lock-in” and the erosion of the “invisible hand” by AI-driven dynamic pricing. Furthermore, the Article examines how a state-owned platform’s “quasi-taxation effect” could be exacerbated by AI-driven first-degree price discrimination. It argues that even in purely private markets, AI-driven pricing may generate a similar quasi-taxation effect. In some cases, however, a “quasi-subsidy effect” may also occur for consumers with lower reservation prices. The Article also briefly discusses regulatory responses, including the importance of obtaining enhanced consumer consent for the use of personal information in AI-driven pricing strategies.

This article distinguishes isolationist and integrationist accounts of the legal-economic nexus. Isolationists deny the possibility of integrating different theoretical perspectives, while integrationists try to unify different accounts. Leading legal theorists have recently presented isolationist efficiency-, liberty-, and democracy-centred accounts of the market. It is argued that the legal–economic nexus is an integrationist concept, requiring an integrationist understanding of the constitutive role of law in the economy – a common view within the Law and Political Economy movement. Two integrationist strategies are presented: structural integrations and epistemic translations. Using them, an integrated consumer-centric account of the market is offered: consumers are not mere instruments; they are the lead actor, with all the entitlements in terms of powers, rights, and responsibilities that this position of authority entails.

While there is growing evidence that employers hold substantial market power and that workers suffer from worsened working conditions as a result, interventions against employer conduct through EU competition law remain limited. A possible reason for this reserved approach is the predominance of consumer welfare as the objective of the law. To be sure, harm inflicted on workers by employers may under certain circumstances translate also into harm to downstream consumers. But in other cases the effect on consumers may be neutral or even positive. Against this background, this Article offers two lines of argument for EU competition law to recognize harm suffered by workers from restricted competition between employers as a form of harm relevant in itself. First, the Article argues that harm to any market counterparty, including workers, is a sufficient condition for intervention. Second, in the alternative, the Article argues that at least harm to individuals at the edges of supply chains, that is final consumers as well as workers, warrants action. In any case, EU competition law should not be more Catholic than the Pope: The pursuit of consumer welfare, as an objective borrowed from U.S. antitrust, should not lead to less intervention against employer conduct than we see in the United States.

Pests and diseases like citrus greening that threaten agricultural productivity also pose a risk to consumers. Reductions in food supply due to outbreaks and spread could increase food prices. We model U.S. household fruit demand using a Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System and data from Circana’s 2020 and 2021 household panel. Price and income elasticity estimates reveal how household behavior might adjust with shocks to citrus and other fruit prices. Shocks to retail fruit prices can be from either citrus greening or other phenomena such as adverse weather. We also use compensating variation to estimate the impact that changes in fruit prices could have on consumer welfare.

We examine financial challenges of purchasing items that are readily-available yet symbolic of loving relationships. Using weddings and funerals as case studies, we find that people indirectly pay to avoid taboo monetary trade-offs. When purchasing items symbolic of love, respondents chose higher price, higher quality items over equally appealing lower price, lower quality items (Study 1), searched less for lower priced items (Study 2) and were less willing to negotiate prices (Study 3). The effect was present for experienced consumers (Study 1), affectively positive and negative events (Study 2), and more routine purchase events (Study 3). Trade-off avoidance, however, was limited to monetary trade-offs associated with loved ones. When either money or love was omitted from the decision context, people were more likely to engage in trade-off reasoning. By abandoning cost-benefit reasoning in order to avoid painful monetary trade-offs, people spend more money than if they engaged in trade-off based behaviors, such as seeking lower cost options or requesting lower prices.

This contribution reviews the main normative and positive arguments that can used in the assessment of the costs and benefits of food marketing restrictions, focusing specifically on theoretical and empirical developments in the economics of advertising, consumer behaviour and industrial organization since the 70s.