Law professor receives grant to study the legal challenges of surveillance pricing

Companies know more about you than you might think: what you browse, what you buy and potentially even what you’re willing to pay. Increasingly, that data can help determine the price you see on your screen. 

The practice is known as “surveillance pricing,” and as businesses increasingly use algorithms and customer data to individually tailor prices and offers, it is raising a thorny legal question: How much are companies required to tell consumers about how those prices are set? 

Tulane Law professor Mateusz Grochowski is examining that question through a new research project supported by a grant from the Robert Ochis Endowed Fund for Excellence in Intellectual Property. 

“Most U.S. ideas for surveillance pricing regulation run through disclosure. The company has to reveal at least that it uses algorithms to calculate prices,” Grochowski said. “But that push often hits this counterargument: how the algorithms work is protected as intellectual property. The project aims to better understand whether IP is really an obstacle here, and what menu of options policymakers and regulators actually have.” 

As the practice grows, lawmakers have taken different approaches to regulating it. New York requires businesses to notify consumers when prices are set using an algorithm and personal data. Maryland, meanwhile, has taken a more restrictive approach, prohibiting certain food retailers and delivery services from using personalized pricing. No national standard has been established for what consumers should be told, Grochowski said. 

Grochowski’s research will examine these emerging rules in the United States and abroad, including regulatory approaches in the European Union, China, Australia and Brazil. In particular, Grochowski is interested in understanding how disclosure requirements will interact with existing protections for trade secrets, which could extend to pricing algorithms. 

Tulane Law students will work alongside Grochowski on the project, which will take place over the course of 2026 and 2027. Students will be responsible for portions of the research, tracking U.S. regulatory debates over surveillance pricing, examining how trade secret protections apply to pricing algorithms and gathering material on the rules taking shape abroad. Ultimately, these results will help map the terrain of legal approaches to price personalization and offer a blueprint for future research. 

“Students are at the center of this project,” Grochowski said. “Their role is to do real research, not just compile sources. They will also see how comparative research actually gets done, especially in a relatively new field of digital market regulation. Some of them also already found a thread they find interesting and want to run with it — which could end up as their own publishable papers.” 

Grochowski is an established scholar of contract law, consumer protection and the digital economy, with much of his recent work focused on how technology is changing the way prices are set and regulated. He recently co-edited “The Cambridge Handbook of Algorithmic Price Personalization and the Law,” and last summer participated in a high-level discussion at the European Parliament on the future of dynamic and personalized pricing. His latest paper, “Algorithmic Price Fairness,” is forthcoming in the Vanderbilt Law Review.