Frank and Steven’s Excellent Corporate-Raiding Adventure.Not coincidentally, quaint pricing practices-an advertised discount off the “list price,” two for the price of one, or simply “everyday low prices”-are yielding to far more exotic strategies. They have ample means to do so: the immense data trail you leave behind whenever you place something in your online shopping cart or swipe your rewards card at a store register, top economists and data scientists capable of turning this information into useful price strategies, and what one tech economist calls “the ability to experiment on a scale that’s unparalleled in the history of economics.” In mid-March, Amazon alone had 59 listings for economists on its job site, and a website dedicated to recruiting them. Simply put: Our ability to know the price of anything, anytime, anywhere, has given us, the consumers, so much power that retailers-in a desperate effort to regain the upper hand, or at least avoid extinction-are now staring back through the screen. But this is what online comparison shopping hath wrought. It may come as a surprise that, in buying a seasonal pie ingredient, you might be participating in a carefully designed social-science experiment.

(Amazon says its price changes are not attempts to gather data on customers’ spending habits, but rather to give shoppers the lowest price out there.) The price of a can of soda in a vending machine can now vary with the temperature outside. He says these sorts of price experiments have become a routine part of finding that right price-and refinding it, because the right price can change by the day or even by the hour. It’s also the preoccupation of Boomerang Commerce, a five-year-old start-up founded by Hariharan, an Amazon alum.

The right price-the one that will extract the most profit from consumers’ wallets-has become the fixation of a large and growing number of quantitative types, many of them economists who have left academia for Silicon Valley. Listen to the audio version of this article: Feature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone.

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