Ethics, Transparency, and Consumer Trust in AI-Enabled Pricing: Implications for Sustainable Technology Entrepreneurship and Economic Policy

AI-driven dynamic pricing has evolved from an optimisation technique into a core infrastructure of the digital economy, such as the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act and global guidelines for trustworthy AI move towards implementation, questions of fairness, transparency, and consumer trust in algorithmic pricing have become urgent for firms, regulators, and entrepreneurial ventures alike. Start-ups and scale-ups are often at the frontier of deploying these systems as sustainable technology for resource-efficient demand management and revenue resilience, yet their dependence on legitimacy makes them particularly exposed to ethical, reputational, and market-acceptance failures. Despite the rapid growth of research on AI ethics, the specific intersection between algorithmic design, normative imperatives, and consumer-centric outcomes remains conceptually fragmented and insufficiently mapped. This study provides a bibliometric mapping of the emerging ethical agenda in AI-driven dynamic pricing at the interface of entrepreneurship, economics, and sustainable technology. A dataset of 38 peer-reviewed articles (2019–2025) was retrieved from Scopus using a targeted search combining dynamic pricing, Artificial Intelligence, and ethics/transparency/consumer trust. Using VOSviewer and Biblioshiny, the analysis integrates performance indicators, keyword co-occurrence, co-citation structure, and thematic evolution. The findings reveal a clear post-2022 shift from optimisation-centric work towards a more integrated discourse in which fairness, transparency, and trust become structurally central. Two dominant clusters emerge, pricing mechanisms with distributive implications and AI-enabled methodologies, while recent literature increasingly links technical design to consumer protection and economic governance, echoing policy developments associated with the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act and debates on circular economy-compatible market practices.