Dan Davies at Back of Mind:
The other week there was a lovely opportunity to observe the way in which economists inhabit a mental reality which is quite adjacent to, but often very different from, the economy. An American hamburger chain announced (and then immediately rolled back when people yelled at it) that it was planning to use Artificial Intelligence to implement “dynamic pricing” to charge people more for their food at busy times of the day and less when things were quieter.
Economists, predictably, loved this idea, and many of them wrote opinion pieces and blogs explaining to the consumers that they were wrong. Marketing people, also quite predictably, and possibly out of some dim memory of an old proverb about telling the customers they are wrong, hated it.
More here.