[ilamont]

I attended the ARinAction summit earlier this month, and heard an interesting tidbit from the MIT Media Lab's Pattie Maes: She requires new students joining her program to watch Black Mirror (1).

In contrast, when I attended business school one of the models held up to us in the very first week was the team at Harrah's who designed a loyalty program for frequent gamblers (2). I remember one of the professors or someone in a video interview we watched crowing, "it was like printing money."

Neither the case nor the instructor had anything to say about the fact that this was basically a technology-driven scheme to extract as much money as possible from members of the public, including gambling addicts and other vulnerable populations. The "big question" at the conclusion of the case reads:

When asked about the company’s long-term vision for its RM system, a member of Harrah’s RM team became thoughtful for a moment. He responded that, while all of the near and longer-term developments described above were critical, he thought there was one important aspect of all RM systems that needed further development. "What I’d really like to know — and I pose this as a question for researchers in revenue management — is how to integrate information about price elasticity into these systems. Clearly, changes in price affect the level of demand we experience. However, none of the systems we are familiar with capture this effect."

1. https://theoutline.com/post/3167/black-mirror-mit-class?zd=4...

2. https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/ited.1090.003...