Lindsay Owens, Gouged: The End of a Fair Price — and What That Means for Your Wallet
- When
- Thursday, November 19, 20264:00 PM – 5:15 PM PSTAdd to calendarGoogle Calendar
- Where
- Building 120, McClatchy Hall, Main Quad Studio 40Building 120, Stanford, CA 94305Open in Maps
- Hosted by
- Sociology Department
Reminders arrive as notifications from the NextToU iPhone app. Get the app
About
Join us for a second installment of our Open and Engaged lecture series. A fireside chat with Professor Robb Willer moderating.
About the fireside chat: Everywhere you turn, Americans are getting ripped off: Online ticket sellers hide behind exorbitant extra fees. Landlords use software to band together and organize artificial rent hikes. Surveillance pricing, algorithmic price fixing, and other high-tech forms of price gouging are the latest frontiers in corporate profiteering, and they’re distorting markets and undermining American households’ financial security.Building on the novel research and analysis in Dr. Lindsay Owens’s new book Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—And What That Means for Your Wallet, this conversation explores the modern landscape of predatory pricing and corporate profit-seeking. Dr. Owens will unpack how unprecedented corporate consolidation combined with algorithms that test, personalize, and coordinate prices at a scale unimaginable a decade ago has given companies incredible power and transformed pricing into a highly engineered science. As a result, the old pricing rulebook is gone. In its place, there’s a new credo: The best price is the one you personally are willing to pay. Owens is President and CEO of Groundwork Collaborative, a leading economic think tank and corporate watchdog.
Lindsay Owens is president and CEO of the Groundwork Collaborative. A nationally recognized public policy expert, she is widely sought after for media commentary, congressional testimony, and innovative investigative research on corporate malfeasance, financial markets, consumer protection, and affordability. She regularly advises government officials, candidates for elected office, and members of Congress and has served as a senior advisor to lawmakers including Senator Elizabeth Warren. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, and she frequently contributes to CNN, CNBC, CBS, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, Planet Money and Marketplace. Owens holds a PhD in sociology from Stanford University ('14) and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.