Data Mining and Antitrust‪.‬

I. INTRODUCTION In 2000, customers of Amazon.com discovered that the online retailer was varying the prices charged for DVDs depending on the identity of the purchaser. (1) Although Amazon discontinued what it described as a "price test" (2) after public outcry, Amazon's brief foray into first-degree price discrimination stands as a noteworthy example of the possibilities for price discrimination using aggregated data. In its price test, Amazon sought to use information it already had about its customers to predict higher prices that the customers would still be likely to pay. (3) Nearly a decade later, brokers of consumer information now sell terabytes of data for the purposes of market segmentation and other consumer analytics. (4)