A Civic Reads Conversation with Author Dr. Lindsay Owens

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Join us for an insightful evening with Dr. Lindsay Owens, author of Gouged: The End of A Fair Price – And What That Means for Your Wallet. Local author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett Graff will join Dr. Owens in conversation. 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’ 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 have 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. Phoenix Books will have copies of Gouged available for purchase and signing by Dr. Owens. Please register below. Location: Main Reading Room , Main Library.

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