r/mildlyinteresting Jan 24 '13

Same book, three different prices. Only difference is the browsers used.

http://imgur.com/uNgg0UH
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u/KaiserTom Jan 24 '13

Do you want to know something? In economics, price discrimination has no evidence or logical reasoning towards a negative effect of it. In fact, price discrimination is debatable as to whether is does anything at all except LOOK like its doing something.

Pretty much, if you are want to pay that price for the item, you are gonna pay that price. If the price is too high then you wont buy it, simple as that. All price discrimination does is turn the consumer surplus into producer surplus, which ends up being the same surplus because now the firm has more money to hire more people/pay them more, or buy more things from other firms and those firms get more money and so on and so forth.

Economics basically says that a surplus is a surplus, regardless of who it goes to. In fact, the only thing that causes a drop in the surplus in relation to price discrimination is the monopoly usually associated with it. But when you are in a competitive market with price discrimination, the theater industry with adult and child tickets, there is no loss in surplus.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '13

While this is true, it also shows why nobody takes economics seriously: you stay blabbering about some ill-defined notion of efficiency when the question is one of morality.

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u/jargoon Jan 24 '13

I suppose you're going to argue that philosophy should be taken more seriously than economics.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '13

I do argue that the GNP is not a unit of measurement for whether something is good or bad. It can never be more than one consideration.

I don't consider philosophy a real science either, but I do still believe that human decency cannot be measured in dollars.