> What if they’re not incompetent and you intentionally looked at Lamborghini seat covers, then, and correctly flagged you as willing to pay more as a result?
What they're more likely to do is show you higher end products, because a rich person (or the person they hire to buy things for them) still has the capacity to compare prices for the same product and then charging more for the same thing still loses them the sale in a competitive market. Whereas if they show you the premium product instead of the base product because they've correctly surmised that you'll prefer the better product even if it costs more, is that even bad?
> What if that fake sale tactic only works on you when your willpower is low and they know it?
Then they still use it all the time because that's more effective than trying to guess when your willpower is lower and sometimes being wrong.
> Price fixing by software is a real thing.
It's a hypothetical thing where it works as long as everybody is using the same software. Like the other methods of price fixing, it stops working as soon as anybody does something different because then customers just start buying from them, and then we're back to needing to make sure there are enough competitors that that's what happens.
> I agree that ensuring lots of competitors is a better way to avoid it. How would Colorado do that?
In a lot of markets it's already the case but they're applying laws like this to them anyway. In consolidated markets, we largely already have antitrust laws and the main problem is a lack of enforcement, so maybe go chop up some large corporations.
There are also some cases when the courts issue a bad antitrust interpretation and then you need the legislature to pass a short bill that basically points to that case and says "no, the opposite of that".
Dynamic personalized pricing is a real thing. Has been for ages. The old-fashioned techniques are coupons and loyalty cards, or just having higher prices in higher-end stores. Competition isn't nearly as perfect as you say. It's very common for high-end stores to sell identical items at higher prices and still sell plenty of them.
These days you can do a much better job if you have data about your prospective customer. This is not a hypothetical. For example, Target was found to charge higher prices in their app if your location was close to one of their stores. Orbits and Delta have both been found to offer personalized prices as well.
https://retailwire.com/discussion/will-targets-dynamic-prici...
https://www.fastsimon.com/ecommerce-wiki/personalization/dyn...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/personalized-pricing-ha...
Price fixing where everybody uses the same software is a real thing. RealPage recently settled a lawsuit over this.
You seem to be taking a very Libertarian approach where you assume economics 101 wins out over anything more complex, but if you look at what's actually going on in the world this is not the case.