AIM Framework glossary
Blind Pricing
Canonical definition
Blind pricing is a market design in which transaction prices are private and only known to the buyer, seller, and regulator, while quality, function and other non-price differentiating factors remain visible, in order to remove both the comparative price signals and the observable price sequences that fuel mimetic herding, inflation, collusion, and speculative bubbles in high-M, high-observability sectors.
Explanation
Under blind pricing, people can still compare how good different options are, but they cannot see what others paid or are currently bidding, and finegrained realtime price feeds are suppressed. This lets new money and demand flow into appetitive and intrinsic domains without instantly triggering copycat behaviour and status races that would otherwise inflate prices and re-concentrate surplus in the most visible markets. The suppression covers the movement of prices as well as their size, and the movement is the harder half. A price that is merely seen invites a comparison; a run of prices that is seen invites a forecast, and a party who forecasts a rise buys now, at a price nobody has charged yet, which is how a visible run of prices produces the rise it appeared only to describe. Only the mimetic component of a price grows without limit, so a forecast extrapolated from a run of prices is a forecast of that component alone.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct.