Predicting Prices, Persuading Users: Price Recommendations and The Rhetorical Logic of Algorithms

Abstract

Social studies of price-setting are generally focused on the production of prices in the markets. This chapter is about the different types of prices and the exploitation of one price type for commercial purposes. The twofold nature of prices (technical and rhetorical), consolidated here in a recommendation algorithm, is defined, through an ethnographic case study of start-up company in France, from 2014 to 2015. The price is thus considered as a good in itself, which not only has to be produced but sold (and not always by honest means), opening the way to an anthropological critique of the “reality of prices.”

Citation

Pigounidès, V. (2020), "Predicting Prices, Persuading Users: Price Recommendations and The Rhetorical Logic of Algorithms", Wood, D.C. (Ed.) Anthropological Enquiries into Policy, Debt, Business, and Capitalism (Research in Economic Anthropology, Vol. 40), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 71-89. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0190-128120200000040003