I'm starting to think "altruistic pricing" is a skewed framing to begin with. The implication that not maxing out every trick in the book to find the highest price the market will "bear" is a loss.

That "slack", where people provide better goods and services, for a lower price than the market could theoretically bear, is the very definition of Having Nice Things.

The implied "optimal" price discovery is a highly adversarial process - derived from an every-growing playbook of price discrimination tactics, deceptive marketing, high-pressure sales tactics, exploitation of intertia and other external overheads, covert cuts to the quality being provided, etc, etc.

Such pricing is both a symptom and cause for "low trust society" behaviors. The increasing ubiquity of those "efficient" pricing strategies may very well have amounted to a covert pillaging of the commons.

"altrustic pricing" is also skewed because monopolies and competitive markets have different economically correct prices.

When you have a monopoly you want to supply less at a higher price because it's more profit overall. See chart under "Monopoly Price and Profit" [1]. Layman way to think about this is doubling your price more than doubles your profit (per unit sold) and when you have no competition might not even drop your sales in half.

[1]: https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Economics/Econo...