Yep, and so as a savvy consumer, I'm willing to modify referral URLs, construct false histories by sharing cookies or making cookies specifically to visit other

Yep, and so as a savvy consumer, I'm willing to modify referral URLs, construct false histories by sharing cookies or making cookies specifically to visit other sites which would lower my price, switch user agents out, and do quite a bit of other stuff which would take me only a few minutes to save possibly $50-100. My competition is the average consumer who will do none of this, so in the arms race, I can always be far ahead of I'm willing to invest some time to experiment and reverse-engineer the algorithms.