Abstract This paper discusses a recent controversy in which Amazon.com was found to set a different price for the same product to different customers. This document addresses the ethical implications that such action could have on such a young industry. Is it discrimination or is it justified research? Picture this: You're walking the aisles of your favorite grocery store. You have a sudden craving for sweets, so you head to the cereal aisle. There you see a seemingly endless array of colorful boxes. You continue, pushing the cart all the way, and eventually you find yourself in front of a cheerful box of Cap'n Crunch. You look at the price and, lucky for you, this product is on offer! Normally $4.13, now it's just $3.85. You are so pleased with this find that you put the original in the cart and get another box. You think everything is fine until you happen to take a look at the price. This says $4.00! Thinking you've made a mistake, you check the original box and there you see that, in fact, the price is different! In a whirlwind of confusion, you begin randomly selecting boxes of Cap'n Crunch, tossing them aside as you read the price tags. $3.75, $3.90, $4.10. Everything different! You realize that someone out there either has a terrible short-term memory, or they must think you are truly oblivious. Don't you think this could happen? Think again. The same thing happened last September to nearly 7,000 shoppers on the popular e-commerce site Amazon.com while they were naively purchasing their favorite DVDs. When a buyer went online for a particular DVD, they were given a 20, 30, or 40% discount for a specific DVD. The problem was that different prices were given to different customers at the same time! Initially, Amazon thought they could get away with what they called "a random pricing experiment," but when customers started comparing prices on Amazon forums, strange anomalies began to emerge. Customers discovered that not only did different people receive different discounts, but sometimes, if a different browser was used, the same person could get different discounts on the same computer! Needless to say, consumers have lambasted Amazon's betrayal of trust and demanded their money back. In a matter of days, Amazon CEO extraordinaire Jeff Bezos issued an official apology and a refund to his customers, while denying that any