The market as a public space: price tags and the case against personalised pricing

I argue that the market should be understood as a particular type of public space, in which general moral principles are supplemented by principles that are specific to markets. I consider the case for the principle that traders’ offers to consumers should be public, i.e., available to all potential customers. As a point of reference, I discuss how, from the late nineteenth century, price tags allowed public offers to become the norm in retail trade. I contrast public offers with personalised offers—offers that are restricted to specific potential customers. As a result of developments in digital technology, personalised offers are now becoming increasingly common in retail markets, and their legitimacy is an increasingly salient issue in public debate. In the spirit of civil economy, I characterise a well-functioning market as a network of voluntary transactions between consumers, intermediated by traders who seek profit by discovering previously unrealised opportunities for mutually beneficial transactions and by offering these opportunities to consumers in a public space. Viewing markets in this perspective, I argue that personalised offers can undermine valuable properties of the market system and that, accordingly, there should be a defeasible ethical and regulatory presumption in favour of public offers.