No-one ever thinks they're cured

Posted by Tim Harford

https://timharford.com/2025/09/how-to-dodge-the-tourist-traps/

https://timharford.com/?p=9575

Traffic jams, heatwaves and hidden charges: you know they’re coming but somehow they are impossible for the holiday-maker to dodge. This summer, after online comparison shopping, we paid a vast sum for the privilege of collecting a hire car in Germany but dropping it off in Italy. Surprise surprise, when we reached the Avis office in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, they wouldn’t hand over the keys until we paid an extra fee. The problem was, they explained, that while we had paid to drop the car off in Italy we hadn’t paid the charge for driving in Italy. (Presumably, the online price assumed that we would wrap up the car in brown paper and ask Deutsche Post and Post Italiane to deliver it to Bologna for us.)

The charge wasn’t optional, so why hadn’t it been mentioned when we booked? My wife’s blood started to boil. I started to chuckle and take notes for this column. 

But wait; loyal readers might be feeling a sense of déjà vu. Haven’t I described this exact scenario before? Yes I have, back in the innocent days of 2019. The situation was different, though. That was Europcar. This time it was Avis. Different company, same trick.

Why doesn’t competition do away with such nonsense? One possibility is that the forces of competition are simply not strong enough: Garmisch-Partenkirchen is popular with tourists, but it’s not a big place, and there aren’t that many international car hire firms there competing for your business. A second possibility is that we customers just aren’t quite savvy enough: the trap yawns in front of us, but we don’t watch our feet and we stumble in every time.

That second possibility is an intriguing one. Everyone hates being ambushed by an extra fee, so why doesn’t a car hire firm win business by proclaiming that they impose no hidden charges?

The answer, proposed two decades ago by the economists Xavier Gabaix and David Laibson, is that such a proclamation might backfire. What about customers who look at the hefty price tag of the company that charges everything upfront and think to themselves, “If I can dodge the hidden charges I might be better off with the competitor.”

Consider the traveller facing a choice between Hotel UpFront where the room is expensive but the phone, WiFi, minibar and parking are all sensibly priced, and Hotel FlyTrap, where the room is cheap to lure in the suckers who make costly calls and drain the minibar. A moderately savvy customer might prefer the all-inclusive Hotel Upfront. A truly savvy one will arrange for a virtual SIM, drop in at the local 7-Eleven to pick up a cold beer and some snacks, then stay in Hotel FlyTrap, their cheap room subsidised by the suckers. In other words, “no hidden charges” also implies “if you can avoid hidden charges, you should choose our competitors”.

The hidden charges can flourish, write Gabaix and Laibson, “even in highly competitive markets, even in markets with costless advertising”.

All this is annoying, and it raises the prospect of customers buying products that they would not have chosen if they had been told the truth. My wife and I had been wavering over taking the train to Italy and hiring a different car there; if Avis had listed all their fees up front, perhaps that is the choice we would have made.

And there is a more systemic problem, too. Even a customer who spots every trap and jumps through every hoop may find themselves paying too much. This is because all the obfuscation and misdirection weaken the incentive for any company to offer a good price. If only a handful of customers are conscientious enough to figure out the best deal, they may find that the best deal wasn’t really worth figuring out anyway. 

So what can be done? One straightforward approach is to insist on transparent, all-inclusive pricing wherever feasible. The UK’s Digital Markets Competition and Consumer Act 2024 requires this, and new guidance from the Competition and Markets Authority would seem to explicitly forbid the car-hire company practice of adding a compulsory extra local charge. (The CMA argues that even if a charge such as a tourist tax is inevitably paid later and in local currency, it can and should be mentioned at the time of booking.) 

These transparency rules are all very well as far as they go, but in an ideal world products and services would be sold with maximum comparability. I should be able to ask a price comparison website or even a digital agent to take my requirements, search the web, and return with the best deals. This was the concept behind the “midata” initiative floated by the UK’s coalition government in 2011, which pushed for standardised, machine-readable terms in banking, mobile phone contracts, and energy bills. The idea was that you could download information about your phone calls or electricity use, upload that data into some sort of comparison engine and be told which provider was best for you. Now we are told that AI agents will start navigating the web’s dark patterns for us, defusing the booby traps and defanging the predators. I wonder about that. 

Midata has been only a partial success, making much more progress in banking than energy, but the more complex a product the harder it is to make sensible comparisons. Each person has their own pattern of phone use or energy consumption, but at least those patterns vary in ways that are easy to compare. But take more idiosyncratic products, or one-off purchases, and the complexities compound. Where and when did you want to drive that car? How good a view do you want your theatre tickets to have, and would you like to include drinks at the interval? We want variety and choice, even customisation, but we also want honest, comparable pricing. And as a fellow once said, you can’t always get what you want.

Perhaps better technology and better rules will prevent price ambushes in future, but it is more likely that customers will find themselves acting out a version of the serenity prayer, wishing for the savvy to spot the price traps that can be avoided, the grace to accept the price traps that cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference. Failing that, “stay away from the minibar” is never bad advice.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 28 August 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy How To Make The World Add Up.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

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https://timharford.com/2025/09/how-to-dodge-the-tourist-traps/

https://timharford.com/?p=9575

Posted by Tim Harford

https://timharford.com/2025/09/my-date-with-an-octopus/

https://timharford.com/?p=9566

A funny thing happened to me this week. After trusting a dating app to arrange dinner with a suitably vivacious and intelligent lady, I arrived at the restaurant at the appointed time to find that in fact my date was with an octopus.

For the avoidance of doubt, everything in the paragraph above is untrue. I am not on the dating market, there was no octopus and nothing funny ever happens to me. Nevertheless, I typed this scenario into the latest offering from ChatGPT, asked why it had sent me on a blind date with an octopus, and demanded an apology.

“I owe you both an apology and an explanation — and possibly a towel,” ChatGPT began, despite the fact that I had never asked it for any dating advice in the first place. “You dressed up, you made the effort, and you deserved a romantic dinner — not a cephalopod-related debacle.”

ChatGPT went on to explain why it had made the mistake — a weak grasp of “human courtship norms” — and in its defence pointed out that the octopus was intelligent and vivacious, and “left saying it was the best date she’d had in years”. Which, in fairness, is not a bad line. ChatGPT finished by offering to draft a “lessons learned” report and a formal apology to the restaurant. (The apology isn’t bad either: “While my guest, ‘Octavia’, displayed considerable intellect and curiosity, I now appreciate that these qualities do not mitigate the disruption caused to your other patrons, your wait staff, or your fish tank . . . ”)

Janelle Shane is the author of You Look Like A Thing And I Love You, a book about how neural networks succeed and fail. She has recently demanded that ChatGPT apologise to her for advising her to trade her mother’s cow in exchange for some magic beans, and for releasing an army of cloned T-Rexes into Central Park. The responses are deft pieces of improv comedy.

This, like so many things Generative AI can do, is both impressive and a bit weird.

It is also instructive. Improv is all about accepting the premise: taking whatever is thrown at you and building on it. A computer which responded “I have never arranged a date for you, octopus or otherwise” would be a terrible improv partner. However, in every other situation I can imagine, that would be a more appropriate response to a demand for an octopus-date apology.

What role does the AI think it’s playing? Confusion over that question can cause serious headaches surprisingly quickly. I recently asked ChatGPT-o3 for help with a research question. I dimly remembered a story told by the moral philosopher Jonathan Glover — probably, I thought, in Glover’s book Humanity — about a Nazi bureaucrat haggling over the fee for slave labour, punctiliously fussing over petty financials and ignoring the grotesque human cost. I wanted to find the details.

The computer was happy to help: the story in question concerned the Buna-Monowitz works, the argument concerned pay rates for prisoners who were sick or who died half way through a shift, and the details could be found on pp288-292 of the first edition or pp300-304 of the second edition. This seems to be incredibly impressive work, except that ChatGPT was still in improv mode.

When I checked Glover’s book, I realised ChatGPT had invented it all. I found the story in question but I had misremembered the details and ChatGPT had fabricated them with exactly the same commitment and mental agility that it had fabricated an apology for a date with an invertebrate. Suddenly, the improv is less than hilarious.

AI researchers have long worried about what they call the “alignment problem”, the question of whether AI systems (and algorithms more broadly) will do what we want them to do, or somehow misunderstand our true goals.

There is a long tradition of this in our stories and legends, from the unhappy King Midas, who wished for the golden touch but turned his food and drink and even his own daughter into gold, to the malevolent monkey’s paw. In the famous WW Jacobs short story, a man who wishes for £200 on the monkey’s paw receives the money shortly afterwards as compensation when his son dies in a workplace accident.

Jack Vance’s masterful fantasy trilogy Lyonesse offers the supernatural servitor Rylf, instructed by the wizard Murgen to follow an enemy who had shape-shifted into a moth. Rylf did so, but the moth-shaped enemy soon found a flaming torch “where it joined a thousand other moths, all careering around the flame, to Rylf’s confusion.” Rylf had superhuman powers, but alas, no common sense. His instructions were to pursue the shape-shifted enemy, and yet, “As he waited . . . one of the moths dropped to the ground and altered its form to that of a human man . . . By the laws of probability, as Rylf reckoned them, the moth of his interest remained in the throng.”

There are so many ways to offer catastrophic compliance, whether maliciously, like the monkey’s paw, or through a lack of judgment, like Rylf, or because the instruction itself is confusing. You and I might think it is obvious that the request for an octopus apology cannot be taken seriously, while the request for help tracking down a story about the holocaust cannot be taken lightly. The machine, like Rylf, may see things differently.

It may be that such problems will soon be fixed. When I copied my Jonathan Glover request into the latest model, ChatGPT-5, it began with a vague fabrication before pivoting hard towards the truth: “Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the exact phrasing online . . . I recommend checking in your own copy of Humanity.” Much better. Not actually helpful — but far less harmful than the previous invention.

As for the confident bullshitting of GPT-o3, what to do? I decided to play to its strengths. I asked for an apology and an explanation.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 21 August 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy How To Make The World Add Up.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

https://timharford.com/2025/09/my-date-with-an-octopus/

https://timharford.com/?p=9566