GAMA Opposes Personalized Pricing

On 19 August 2026, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) posted its "Proposed Enforcement Policy Statement Regarding Personalized Pricing" and invited comments from the public through 25 September 2026.

During that time period, the FTC received nearly 4,600 comments from individuals and organizations, including a lengthy response from GAMA: The Tabletop Game Association. (While GAMA's response is dated 21 September 2026, I first saw its response in a newsletter GAMA sent out on 6 October 2026.)

Personalized pricing — also known as "customized pricing", "dynamic pricing" or "surveillance pricing" — is a practice in which a business sets different prices for the same product or service based on individual customers' purchase history, location, browsing behavior, and other data. The general idea is that a business wants to make as much money as possible, so if it thinks a particular customer would be willing to pay more than the "average" customer, it could charge that particular customer a higher price. Conversely, a business might offer a price-averse customer a lower price to try to woo that person away from a competing product.

Here's how the FTC summarizes its proposed enforcement policy:

There is growing public concern that modern data collection and processing capabilities can allow businesses to set personalized prices based on analysis of consumers' personal data and resulting conclusions, such as estimates of how much an individual consumer is willing to pay for a product or whether that consumer is likely to engage in comparison shopping. Although personalized pricing is a long-established norm in some markets, it is not in many others. Personalized pricing in the latter markets would therefore run contrary to longstanding practice and consumers' reasonable expectations that the price they see for a product or service is the same price that any other consumer at the same place and time would see.

Congress has not given the Commission the authority to prohibit personalized pricing in all circumstances, but the Commission intends to enforce the law aggressively against any deceptive or unfair personalized pricing practices that violate Section 5 of the FTC Act or any other law enforced by the Commission. Where consumers reasonably expect that prices for a product or service will not vary based on their personal data, businesses that engage in personalized pricing should clearly and conspicuously disclose not just that the price is personalized, but also the basis for that personalization and the types of data on which the personalization is based. The failure to make these disclosures is likely to constitute an unfair or deceptive act or practice in violation of Section 5. The Commission intends to deploy enforcement resources in a manner consistent with this conclusion. [link added]

I sampled twenty-ish comments on the FTC site, and most of them were short comments expressing, as the FTC put it, "growing public concern" in the form of blunt opposition, as with this comment:

I am writing to oppose the plan to personalize pricing. This will lead to an increase in prices, providing more profit to businesses without any benefit to average shoppers.

And this one:

Please ban surveillance pricing. Such pricing exemplifies unfair pricing practices. No one should not have to pay more based on who someone is — or who a company thinks someone is.

And this, the briefest comment I've seen:

Personalized Pricing is un-American. It must be banned.

I'm sure many would argue that personalized pricing is as American as you can get, but I don't need to travel down that road as the Cato Institute has already done so in an eight-page response that includes distractions such as this:

Consumers rarely know why a product is priced at a certain amount. Companies are not deemed to be deceiving consumers when they do not disclose that prices rose due to a supply disruption, if shipping costs or tariff duties increased, or if a viral social media video drove up demand in a way they could not keep up with. Similarly, a firm may act for subjective reasons, such as believing it could increase profits by sacrificing sales volume to raise margins on each sale, and still not be deemed deceitful. They could take this bet with or without access to consumer data. Thus, the Commission is singling out the non-disclosure of data-driven inputs as deceptive without explaining why other inputs are to be left unaddressed, other than by appealing to its novel theory of industry custom.

This is nonsense. If shipping costs or tariff duties increase or demand for an item goes up and a company decides to charge more for that item, they're (historically) raising the price the same amount for each item sold, not charging you more while keeping the price the same for me. The same is true for a company that attempts to "increase profits by sacrificing sales volume to raise margins on each sale". They're raising the price the same margin for each buyer, so get out of here with this false equivalence bullshit. This is not personalized pricing, so stop wasting our time.

The Cato Institute response also brings up senior, student, and veteran discounts as an example of the benefit of "personalized pricing", but those discounts tend to be explicitly posted by the seller so that potential buyers know ahead of time how someone qualifies for a discount, and that public disclosure is the very thing that the FTC is proposing and that the Cato Institute is opposed to.

Anyway, on to GAMA's comment, which includes this straightforward statement:

GAMA opposes personalized pricing and supports efforts to prevent its usage in the areas identified by the Commission, even when such usage is disclosed.

Cool, great! Strong and direct opposition to a practice that, by design, will cost people more money and make everyday shopping akin to the nightmarish experience that is buying a car or an airfare ticket, situations in which you always feel like you got ripped off no matter what you paid.

Unfortunately, that sentence is only the first in a paragraph that continues as follows:

But the FTC's Proposed Standard is a step in the right direction. GAMA therefore supports this partial step, with the proviso that the FTC should specify that providing a basis for such personalization and how personalization decisions conducted must be provided to any individual in a comprehensive, personalized, and easily digestible written summary of how the company collects data on the individual, the databases queried or variables considered, any consumer categories built from that data for internal analysis, and what personalized pricing offers are made based on such assessments, and whether those offers result in higher or lower prices than those offered to an average customer. Businesses that wish to avoid their personalized pricing policies being designated as unfair or deceptive acts should be required to provide this information at no charge to the customer and, for those with online account systems, to place hyperlinks or similar access methods as prominently as they place options to login to an account or to make one. The Proposed Standard should also allow customers to opt-out of personalized pricing programs and prohibit data sharing between the data brokers and middlemen who actual crunch the data when they are servicing different clients.

Ugh, so much for the direct opposition. DON'T LET COMPANIES DO THIS THING...but if you're going to let them do it, add feeble protective measures that seem meaningful, but don't actually stop the practice from taking place. All too often, government rules and practices are set up to favor businesses over people, and any suggestion of an "opt out" feature is a clear indication of this. Don't make people opt out of sales calls, mailed advertisements, email spam, and other nuisances of daily life; force businesses to have people opt in before such advertisements can be sent — and the same should go for the selling of a person's data. To quote from GAMA's statement:

The best practice in all data management is to give consumers as much control over their data as possible, including the decision not to have that data collected at all. While we are often loath to admit it in the tabletop gaming industry, sometimes the easiest way to win the game is not to play at all.

Thankfully, GAMA does re-iterate its opposite to personalized pricing later in its statement, pointing out that protective measures will be as useful as the anti-gambling warnings during a Kalshi commercial:

GAMA opposes personalized pricing practices, as defined by the Proposed Standard, whether or not those efforts are disclosed. The Proposed Standard would require businesses to "clearly and conspicuously disclose" any personalized pricing practices. Personalized pricing is anti-consumer, and businesses should not engage in it. GAMA believes that the FTC has the authority to declare the use of personalized pricing as an unfair or deceptive act or practice and should do so, despite the FTC's statement that "Congress has not given the Commission the authority to prohibit personalized pricing in all circumstances." Any personalized pricing disclosure, no matter how well-designed, is unlikely to be communicated to consumers in a manner that adequately educates them of the broad expanse to which their data may be used. The FTC has broad authority to investigate and prohibit deceptive business practices. The FTC should reconsider its conclusion that it lacks the authority to designate all personalized pricing practices as unfair and deceptive.

In its statement, GAMA points out that it represents both publishers and retailers in the game industry, and allowing personalized pricing could place the two groups in conflict:

Personalized pricing practices will damage GAMA member companies by undermining trust between consumers and retailers and between consumers and publishers that engage in direct sales and by further tilting the playing field in favor of large commercial operators.

The comment window is now closed for the FTC proposal, but if you live in the United States I encourage you to contact your local and federal representatives to express opposition to personalized pricing. Three states — Connecticut, New Jersey, and Maryland — have passed (limited) restrictions on the use of personalized pricing by certain businesses, and more states are considering such measures.

Robbie Sequeira's article about the three states' restrictions includes this closing paragraph:

Consumer advocates say surveillance pricing is difficult to detect because shoppers generally cannot see what another customer is being charged. Retail and technology groups have argued that overly broad restrictions could interfere with discounts and rewards programs and be expensive for businesses to comply.

"Overly broad restrictions could...be expensive for business to comply." Here's a solution: Don't adopt personalized pricing. If you don't, those restrictions are a non-issue. We all know that businesses are investing in this practice solely because they expect to earn more from adopting it, and the only way they earn more is by buyers like us paying more, specifically by some of us paying more than others.

By chance, I just finished reading Bruce Sterling's 1998 novel Distraction, and this passage from nearly thirty years ago sounds prophetic today:

It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities.

It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen...