Just a anecdotal data point: a few months ago I took a trip overseas and had to do it on a pretty short time schedule (<a week). As a grad student this is obviously tough to budget. So I load up my Mullvad Browser and jump around VPN points. Everything was breaking. They very much did not like that browser and the VPN was the cherry on top. But because of this effort I saved about $500 (NYC seemed to be the best location fwiw and I'm on the west coast and flew to Asia).
This felt rather insane and anti-competitive. Each time I changed any variable (including restarting the browser) the price changed and those warnings about number of tickets left would dramatically vary. There is no doubt that that these companies were lying to me. How am I supposed to price compare and we have a competitive market when it's stochastic with high variance? I know airlines claim to work on auctions and economists love auctions, but this wasn't even an auction. This was they knew I was in a bind and just added a dice roll to the price. That's only something a monopoly can do. I don't think this is about being able to select seats, check bags, or buy food.
This felt rather insane and anti-competitive. Each time I changed any variable (including restarting the browser) the price changed and those warnings about number of tickets left would dramatically vary. There is no doubt that that these companies were lying to me. How am I supposed to price compare and we have a competitive market when it's stochastic with high variance? I know airlines claim to work on auctions and economists love auctions, but this wasn't even an auction. This was they knew I was in a bind and just added a dice roll to the price. That's only something a monopoly can do. I don't think this is about being able to select seats, check bags, or buy food.