[car_analogy]

> market becoming more efficient

You mean a company becoming more efficient at extracting money from their un-informed customers. A company finding new ways to leverage their market power, position, and information asymmetry.

[kelseyfrog]

Enterprise B2B sales where contracted prices are never disclosed immediately springs to mind. It's the pinnacle of price discrimination.

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

Why is that bad? That's how free markets work.

Note, the post this is a reply to originally said "You mean a company becoming more efficient at extracting money from customers".

[robbedpeter]

Products aren't priced based on value, but on the maximum a customer will pay. A free market identifies the value of a product through competition between different sellers of the product.

Tinder is entitled to charge as much as they want to whoever they want as long as they're not discriminating against a protected class.

The free market resolution requires competition, though. There might be a reasonable case to be made that products that don't have comparable competition can't be priced in a way that exploits different customers by charging more for receiving the same service or good?

I don't think there's anything comparable to tinder that found be considered legitimate competition- match.com, Madison, adult friend finder, etc are operating in very different markets with very different tools and expectations.

[kelseyfrog]

> There might be a reasonable case to be made that products that don't have comparable competition can't be priced in a way that exploits different customers by charging more for receiving the same service or good?

Price discrimination[1] relies on market power. This is a completely uncontroversial thing. Any discussion on price discrimination will tie back to market power.

1. Not a judgement here. This is a technical term from microeconomics.

[PuppyTailWags]

Inquiry: My understanding is that free markets work in a setting with informed consumers who can make educated choices between competing services.

Is my understanding incorrect?

[barry-cotter]

It can be proven that they work perfectly, i.e. cannot be improved on, under certain strong conditions. They work less than perfectly otherwise. But most markets are never near those conditions and empirically work quite well for the set of thick, widely traded markets with good[1] information.

[1] Not perfect

[jraby3]

Is it really a free market? Doesn’t the network effect create a monopoly?

[iratewizard]

Match group (which owns many of the major dating apps) definitely performs anti-competitive and borderline illegal behavior. But tinder is far from a monopoly. The fact that they own 22 dating app companies is testament to how easy it is to break into that market.

[bradlys]

It’s a testament as to how easy to break in. It is not a testament as to how easy it is to turn a profit. These companies get bought by match because they’re not super profitable and able to compete until end of time against match.

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

To be fair, it's hard to expect to make much of a profit when there are 22 companies out there already selling the same exact product. Online dating is pretty much dead as a direction for new startups to pursue, one big red ocean at this point, and there's no clever play left in it that would set a new players in the space apart.

I don't see how consolidation into a couple of major players swallowing most of the companies in the space is avoidable. It's Booking Holdings vs Expedia Group all over again.