Odd Lots: AI Agents Are Already Changing the Price of Goods

I don't like the idea of okay, someone. It's like, oh, it's Joe Weisenthal shopping for this. Who works at Bloomberg Probably gets paid pretty well, etc., so we're going to, you know, we're going to find the optimal price point that he might be willing to say yes to. I don't love that. On the other hand, could this be used for someone who is in a lot worse condition than me, who the algorithm determines does not have as good of a job I have? And maybe they get a really good price. Means testing for Big Macs. Yeah. That's right. Um, well, the first thing we should say is this is definitely going to happen to you. And we've got some really good examples of this. Okay, so Expedia has been found to charge more for the exact same Manhattan hotel room. If you log on from the Bay area where they think you're more affluent and a lot more. Right. Um, so this is going to happen. We have now a really interesting study of a genetic commerce that just came out. They did an experiment with 325,000 agents, and they asked the agents to go find the cheapest item. Okay. Even when directed explicitly to go get the cheapest item, the agents routed around and your email inbox identified that you could indeed afford more than the cheapest option and brought back a more expensive option, which I need to be clear in here. An agent. So an agent that's working on my behalf, are you saying would not actually be working on my behalf? That's exactly right. That's what the experiment discovered. They asked the agents to buy flights. These were pretty big ticket items, health insurance plans, and to select a graduate program. And even if you said, bring me the cheapest health insurance plan, once the agent figured out a little bit about your financial profile. Yeah, basically the the they said, hey, I think this guy can afford the gold plan.