By Jessica Plautz from Mashable

When searching for a flight or hotel room online, it’s hard to know if you’re getting the best price.

A new study from Northeastern University looked at how much prices change based on the user, and found a greater percentage of inconsistencies on travel sites than other kinds of retailers. The study looked at personalized prices over a couple weeks for hundreds of actual users, as well as for fake accounts.

“Overall, we find numerous instances of price steering and discrimination on a variety of top e-​​commerce sites,” the study authors wrote, while also noting that most of the experiments on the 16 sites did not find price steering or price discrimination.

The travel websites in the study — “Measuring Price Discrimination and Steering on E-commerce Web Sites” — include CheapTickets, Travelocity, Priceline, Orbitz, Hotels.com and Expedia, among others.

Among the findings:

Cheaptickets and Orbitz offered reduced prices to members who were logged in

Expedia and Hotels.com pushed some users to more expensive hotels

Travelocity personalized search results if a user was on a mobile device

Priceline personalized search results based on a user’s click and purchase history

Charging people different prices is legal, and in some cases can be a good thing for consumers. For example, a coupon could be considered price discrimination, according to Asst. Professor Christo Wilson, who was an author on the study.

But as websites get more personalized and learn more about users, the opportunities for websites to discriminate increase.

There are ways to check the value of the prices you are shown on different sites: Search when signed in, then when not. Clear the cookies on your browser. Try the same search on your computer and on your phone.

But not even those steps will give you a complete picture. “I get this question from people all the time: ‘How do I get the best price?’” Wilson says. “The truth is I don’t have a good answer. It changes depending on the site, and the algorithms they use change regularly. Good advice today might not be good advice tomorrow.

“The point is that as a consumer, you’re at a disadvantage unless it’s transparent.”

In response to the study, Expedia told Mashable that it regularly uses A/B testing “to determine which features customers appreciate most.”

“Expedia does not, however, manipulate prices in this way when presenting options to customers,” a spokesperson said. “Rather, we sort options that we expect customers to prefer based on trends we have seen from similar searches … Expedia’s goal is to present customers with options that they will find immediately appealing.”

The complete report is available here [PDF].

IMAGE: FLICKR, JOSEPH

For more on this story go to: http://mashable.com/2014/10/27/online-price-discrimination/?utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher