Airline price discrimination: a practice of yield management or customer profiling?

Airline ticket prices frequently change, which is usually caused by yield management as price discrimination practice. Recently, buyers of online airline tickets tend to complain about price discrimination based on customer profiling, e.g. by means of cookie data. As cookie data and other directly or indirectly obtained customer information is easily available via the Internet, airlines may use this information to offer personalized ticket prices. In a month-long experiment, in which prices of airline tickets were tracked, we found that cookies were not used to determine prices. However, customer information from other direct sources seems to be important in dynamic pricing. Besides, it was discovered that most price changes occurred in the morning; these were usually minor price changes and were mostly seen at full-service carrier