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Things are moving: a year ago today, the only safe way to buy your Most at a good price was to stop at a gas station. Ecological, and basically economic nonsense. Now we’re one step ahead: last spring I introduced a price comparison app to increase competition, it only took TCS a few months to launch their gasoline price radar.
The need was clearly great. The app, which requires customers to record prices at their gas stations, has been in use ever since. The information in the application is not 100% reliable, some data is a week or even a month old, and not all gas stations are listed. But you can see trends as to which gas stations get cheaper over time. It’s better than nothing.
AI is already being used as a test
The question is, are we well prepared for the future in this way? I doubt it. Because artificial intelligence (AI) has entered the gas station business. This means that gas station operators are increasingly optimizing their selling prices using artificial intelligence-based pricing algorithms. We should not be naive: price optimization means profit maximization. Such systems are already being used in test mode at Migrol. How long will it take before the rest of the industry follows suit? I can’t tell you, but events in other countries suggest it won’t be for long.
The use of AI-powered pricing algorithms is not prohibited, at least not yet. So it’s important to me that clients have good tools at their disposal to counter this development. A price comparison app would be very suitable for this, but the data must always be complete and reliable. The experience of other countries shows that prices change several times a day when they are optimized and fixed by pricing algorithms.
The “customers collect prices for customers” model will not survive such an appreciation. AI price optimization means that every possible data about our behavior is collected and evaluated. The goal is to maximize profit by exploiting our information scarcity and our limited rationality. For us, this means: the better we are informed, the better we are protected.
Austria leads
Austria has a comparison platform that covers all filling stations in the country. All gas stations are required to report price increases and decreases immediately. The price comparison app only shows those with the lowest prices, preventing the cheaper supplier from adjusting their prices to those of their more expensive neighbor. In other words: Austrian consumers always have complete and accurate real-time price data. Thus, they are better protected from being exploited by profit-maximizing price algorithms.
There is another benefit: if the machines overdid it and had problematic designs, then this data quality would make it much easier to recognize and intervene if necessary. This would be the case, for example, if pricing algorithms began to undermine competition through tacit agreements. Such cases have already been observed abroad. I think we should make our instruments forward-looking, as is the case in Austria.
Source: Blick
I am David Miller, a highly experienced news reporter and author for 24 Instant News. I specialize in opinion pieces and have written extensively on current events, politics, social issues, and more. My writing has been featured in major publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, and BBC News. I strive to be fair-minded while also producing thought-provoking content that encourages readers to engage with the topics I discuss.
