Week 2: Continued Research and Interview Planning

In my research, I believe that gathering feedback from the general population is just as important as reading academic journals and conducting professional interviews because of my focus on the ethics behind its usage. Welcome back to my blog! I hope everyone enjoyed their spring break. This week I delved deeper into academic articles and began planning for my surveys and interviews.

When reading my articles this week something that I found interesting and also applied to many of you reading my blog is prices for colleges are dynamically priced. Because colleges base the amount of financial aid they give you off of the student’s merit and the family’s financial position, effectively charging different prices to different students based on the demographic characteristics of the consumers, which is one of the things that dynamic prices depend on.

I also dedicated time this week to researching potential interviewees in the relevant field. To respect the current controversy surrounding dynamic pricing, I will offer all interviewees the option to remain anonymous. 

Also, on the topic of current controversies surrounding dynamic pricing, I want to touch on the lawsuit that a Taylor Swift fan filled against LiveNation. Despite the fan dropping it, I thought it was interesting to understand. The fan filed this lawsuit after the disastrous presale of tickets to her Eras Tour. The fan claimed that LiveNation was a “monopoly” that had “knowingly misled millions of fans.” According to my on-site advisor, a senior executive at a major ticketing company, the delays and website crashes as fans were trying to buy tickets would have just been an overcrowding of the website and had no correlation to LiveNation trying to use dynamic pricing (which as I mentioned in my week 0 post would not have been LiveNation’s decision but rather Taylor Swifts) or them misleading fans.

Though I am mainly focusing my research on the concert and airline industries I want to talk about the hotel industry briefly today. Mr. Lee, my Basis Independent advisor, sent me an article this week about how prices for hotels have skyrocketed this week because of the solar eclipse. In “Grayville, Illinois, [they are] advertising rooms between $765 and $949 from Sunday through Tuesday. On most days, the rooms typically cost $80.” (Goel) This is a perfect example for pricing being affected by demand. Because of the sudden increase in people wanting hotel rooms, and even Airbnb in the area around the solar eclipse path, the companies are taking advantage to increase their revenue. Hotels and Airbnb aren’t the only companies doing this either, “Establishments like Smoothie King, Applebees, and Sonic are offering special eclipse-themed smoothies, margaritas, and “blackout” drinks to mark the occasion.” (Goel)

Things like this show how relevant dynamic pricing is and why consumers should understand it more. Thank you for reading my blog this week, and I hope you will join me next week.