[danpalmer]

There's a lot of existing legislation around the world about discounting as well.

In many countries to be able to discount you need to have sold an item at full price for a certain amount of time, and you can't discount for more than another amount of time (i.e. to prevent perpetual discounting).

In some countries you can't sell the same item at different prices for different customers. You can issue different discount codes to different customers, but those would likely need to be widely applicable so that it's not just different pricing in disguise.

Having worked in an ecommerce company, I'm excited by the prospect of better automated pricing tools and tools that can do things like target sell-through by a particular date. However as a consumer and keen advocate for consumer rights, I'm concerned about a future where every last penny is eeked out of consumers by automated systems designed to identify ways they can be exploited with pricing.

[htrp]

I believe the term you're looking for is consumer surplus, and the economic concept they're enabling is effectively perfect price discrimination.