| Not aware of a term, per se, but this is typical of many service-related goods, especially in transportation and communications in which the fundamental underlying service (getting somewhere, getting a message somewhere) is not readily differentiated. That's directly applicable to the air-travel example here. 19th century French polymath (economist, engineer, bureaucrat) Jules Dupuit famously described this concerning railway carriage accomodations and the parlous state of third-class carriages: It is not because of the several thousand francs which they would have to spend to cover the third class wagons or to upholster the benches. ... [I]t would happily sacrifice this [expense] for the sake of its popularity. Its goal is to stop the traveler who can pay for the second class trip from going third class. It hurts the poor not because it wants them to personally suffer, but to scare the rich. <https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/why-does-air-travel-suck-...> More on Dupuit: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Dupuit> You'll find similar examples in digital / software goods, where product differentiation (and price discrimination) are often achieved by producing otherwise identical goods, and then selectively disabling features in the lower-priced variants. Microsoft Windows NT server vs. workstation was one early notorious example, though IBM also apparently included No-OP loops in servers which could be disabled for higher performance. See: <https://landley.net/history/mirror/ms/differences_nt.html>. (I've ... mentioned Dupuit previously: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>.) |