What Price is Right?
(May 14th at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce)
Today’s conversations about pricing are no longer confined to the kitchen table. They are increasingly shaped by politics, enforcement, public perception, and fast-moving technological change. The Chamber designed this program to help members cut through the noise, better understand how pricing decisions are made, and engage more confidently in the legal, policy, and political debates that now surround them.
These excerpts from the program address how businesses think about price, how enforcers and policymakers frame fairness and consumer harm, and how the broader affordability debate may shape the environment ahead.
How Prices Get Made
How do companies actually think about pricing in competitive markets? This fireside chat will explore the fundamentals of pricing strategy, including how firms weigh competition, consumer demand, and business realities when bringing products and services to market.
Speaker: Arnab Sinha, Managing Director, Senior Partner Consumer, and Marketing, Sales & Pricing Practice Boston Consulting Group
Moderator: Mark Mathews, Chief Economist, Executive Director, Research National Retail Federation
Examining Prices & Fairness
“Fairness” is one of the most frequently invoked and least clearly defined concepts in debates over pricing. This interview will explore four different fairness frameworks and why each is incompatible with the others. The “fairness” objective one chooses drive very different pricing and policy outcomes.
Speaker: Dr. Maxime C. Cohen, Professor of Retail & Operations Management Scale AI Chair in Data Science for Retail, McGill University
Moderator: Ashley Gum, Vice President, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Present & Future: How do antitrust & consumer protection laws think about prices?
This conversation will examine when prices cross the legal line, how enforcers think about price and fairness, and where tensions arise with common pricing practices deployed across the economy.
Speaker: Christine Wilson, Partner, Freshfields Former Commissioner, Federal Trade Commission
Moderator: Sean Heather, Senior Vice President, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
