Sources & citations

Where every claim
comes from.

Every statistic, case, and number on this site traces back to a source. Here they all are, organized by type. Academic papers, regulatory filings, news investigations, and the books that shaped how we think about this.

01 Academic & Peer-Reviewed

Hannak, A., Soeller, G., Lazer, D., Mislove, A., & Wilson, C. (2014)

Measuring Price Discrimination and Steering on E-commerce Web Sites

IMC ’14: Proceedings of the 2014 Internet Measurement Conference

Chen, L., Mislove, A., & Wilson, C. (2016)

An Empirical Analysis of Algorithmic Pricing on Amazon Marketplace

WWW ’16: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web

Chen, L., & Wilson, C. (2017)

Observing Algorithmic Marketplaces In-the-Wild

ACM SIGecom Exchanges, Vol. 15, Issue 2

Möller, J. & Chen, X. (2023)

Personalized Pricing in Ride-Hailing: Evidence from a Field Audit

Working paper, Columbia Business School and NYU Stern

Mikians, J., Gyarmati, L., Erramilli, V., & Laoutaris, N. (2012)

Detecting Price and Search Discrimination on the Internet

HotNets-XI: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks

02 Regulatory & Government

Federal Trade Commission (2014)

Big Data: A Tool for Inclusion or Exclusion?

FTC Report, January 2016

Federal Trade Commission (2024)

FTC Inquiry on Surveillance Pricing

6(b) study of pricing personalization practices

New York Department of Financial Services (2018)

Report on Price Optimization in Insurance

NYDFS investigation into the loyalty penalty in auto insurance

European Commission (2022)

Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA)

EU Regulation 2022/2065 and 2022/1925 on online platforms and gatekeepers

California Privacy Protection Agency (2023)

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and amendments

California’s consumer data rights framework

03 Industry & News Investigations

Valentino-DeVries, J., Singer-Vine, J., & Soltani, A. (2012)

Websites Vary Prices, Deals Based on Users’ Information

The Wall Street Journal, December 24, 2012 (Staples location-based pricing investigation)

Mattioli, D. (2012)

On Orbitz, Mac Users Steered to Pricier Hotels

The Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2012

Consumer Reports (2022)

How Online Retailers Hide the Best Price

Consumer Reports investigation into e-commerce coupon personalization

Consumer Federation of America (2021)

The Auto Insurance Loyalty Penalty

CFA study on premium increases for long-term policyholders

Profitero (2023)

Amazon Price Change Analytics

Industry analytics report on Amazon’s repricing frequency

NerdWallet (2023)

Hotel Booking Rate Comparison Study

Cross-channel rate testing methodology

Washington Post (2023)

How Airlines Price You

Investigative feature on airline fare personalization

04 Books & Long-Form

Zuboff, S. (2019)

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

PublicAffairs / Hachette Book Group

O’Neil, C. (2016)

Weapons of Math Destruction

Crown Publishing Group

Eubanks, V. (2018)

Automating Inequality

St. Martin’s Press

Pasquale, F. (2015)

The Black Box Society

Harvard University Press

A note on methodology

How we built the simulator and the case studies

The factor weights in the simulator are not pulled from company internals (nobody outside those companies has those). They’re approximated from published audit studies, academic empirical research, regulatory filings, and industry analytics reports like the ones above.

Where different sources disagreed on a number, we went with the more conservative estimate. Where a case study cites a specific dollar figure or percentage, it comes from a specific source in this list.

This is a student project, not an academic paper. If you find an error, or a better source for anything on the site, let us know. We’ll update.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or sources we missed

This project is a living document. If you’ve got a source we should cite, a correction we should make, or just a question, the easiest way to reach the team is through the course instructor at RIT Saunders.

Team PricePoint · MGIS 130 · Spring 2026