Price discrimination is the practice of charging
different customers different prices for the same
product or service. The ethical status of price
discrimination is ambiguous: while many people
intuitively consider it unfair, economists argue that in
many cases the practice is likely to lead to higher
welfare than the uniform pricing alternative—in some
cases for each and every party to the transaction. This
paper argues that in itself the fact that people are
treated differently does not make a practice necessarily
unethical. The paper concludes by arguing that the real
ethical issue in cases of price discrimination is that
the practice is often used as a way to take advantage of
the situation of special need or the ignorance of some
customers, and that this is what makes the practice
unethical in such cases, not price discrimination as
such. 2009 pdf
