Cash is just another input. Concentrations of wealth, concentrations of cash, throw firm surpluses to the wealthy. Deconcentrate wealth, deconcentrate cash, and corporate surpluses will fall more evenly across inputs to the firm.
Education, or perhaps the better word is training, is the most important method of good governance in the unitary state because there is no market or public to discipline administration. Control of the mind is not just about dissent but about performance. Free speech rights undermine the unitary state as an effective organ by making it impossible for the state to perform. By contrast, market economies function well on very little organizational education — training — because of the discipline of the market and the voting of feet.
What I mean by training is the altering of human preferences to ensure that the trainee makes the most efficient set of credible threats.
Reasoning by analogy is a staple of legal practice, but entirely illegitimate. Suppose that the legislature prohibits the separation of a product from its trademark. Suppose now that Facebook posts newspaper stories without placing the trademark of the newspaper beside the story. The lawyer might say: “that’s just like selling an iPhone with the name iPhone scraped off of the package!” And so it is. But if there is no reason to think that the legislature was thinking about newspapers when the legislature passed the law, there is no basis for interpreting the law to apply to newspapers. What matters for legitimacy is intent, not analogy. Put another way, lawyers suppose that legislatures intend all cases that apply by analogy to be covered by their laws. But what basis have we to think that? And yet lawyers interpret through analogy all the time.
It is not freedom, but coherence, that we seek. I do not mind my role, if you can convince me that it matters.
I’m an engineer by training. I’m a very systems, process, methodical decision maker. He’s an entrepreneur. Different mind-set.
Management runs publicly-traded companies like ExxonMobil. Owners run private firms. The former are bureaucracies, the latter, fiefs. The former are a progressive invention, the latter much older. There is managerial capitalism, and then there is finance capitalism. There are corporations, and then there are businesses. Their leaders may look similar; they will all be, after all, rich. But they belong to different worlds. Ross, Mnuchin, and Trump belong to one world. Tillerson to another. The distinction is so lamentably obscure to the national consciousness that even the members of these groups sometimes fail to understand that they are different.
Have you ever paid so much for something that you had to wonder whether it was really worth it? What prices would trigger that feeling for you? $25 for toothpaste? $2,500 for a Broadway ticket? Armies of data analysts are working hard right now to help companies identify and charge those individualized prices to you.
This practice, called “price discrimination” in economics jargon, and “dynamic pricing” by industry, was pioneered in its new data-driven form by the airlines, which explains why you feel uneasy telling the passenger sitting next to you what you paid for your ticket. But serious debate about the merits of the practice has coalesced only in the past year around Broadway ticket prices, as charges for the top shows, such as Hamilton, have spiked into the $800 range.
While consumers rage about the practice, two commentators have leapt to its defense. Harvard economist Greg Mankiw claimed to be “happy about” paying $2,500 for a ticket to Hamilton. James B. Stewart, usually a perceptive critic of business practices, seemed to agree in a recent Times column that complaints reflect “anticapitalist bias.”
Dynamic pricing is neither necessary for capitalism nor consistent with it. But the practice does impoverish consumers, which is why they have good reason to be angry.
Mankiw and Stewart want us to believe that dynamic pricing is necessary for what economists call “rationing:” the problem of deciding which of a group of consumers, all of whom can afford to pay a price sufficient to cover the costs of production, should get access to a product when the supply of that product is limited. There are only 1,319 seats in the Richard Rogers theater in New York, where Hamilton plays, but on any given night many more prospective ticket buyers are willing to pay enough to cover the costs of the production. Rationing determines who gets to attend.
There are many ways to ration. Charging a price equal to cost, and providing access on a first come, first served basis, remains a popular approach. Any restaurant that takes reservations follows this approach, as does Southwest Airlines, which allocates many of the best seats on its flights to those who check in first online.
Another approach, which generates additional profits for businesses, is to grant access only to those who can afford to pay the most. This is what airlines do when they charge a premium for first class seats. Economists once argued that this was the best approach, because alternatives required consumers to waste time standing on lines or getting through to a busy phone number. But online reservations systems, which are virtual queues, have more or less eliminated that problem.
One thing that is not required for effective rationing, however, is dynamic pricing. The distinctive feature of dynamic pricing is the charging of different prices to different groups of consumers. But setting a single fixed price, as Broadway shows did until the early 2000s, does just as good a job. To choose 1,319 Hamilton audience hopefuls, charge the single fixed price that only 1,319 of them are willing to pay.
Mankiw was therefore mistaken when he wrote that only because a scalper could charge him $2,500 was there a ticket waiting for him to buy two weeks before showtime. If the theater, or the scalper, had charged the right fixed price, Mankiw’s ticket would still have been right there waiting for him when he went to buy.
But the ticket would have been a lot cheaper. Dynamic pricing is really about profits. Of the 1,319 Hamilton audience hopefuls who can afford to pay the most, some, like Mankiw, who has reportedly earned more than $42 million in royalties on his popular introductory economics textbook, can afford to pay much more than others. Dynamic pricing allows a ticket seller to segment these hopefuls into groups based on characteristics that suggest how much each is willing to pay, and raise price to those groups that are able to pay more. Broadway’s embrace of dynamic pricing has probably played a role in generating the $1.45 billion profit enjoyed by the industry last year.
But so what if consumers pay higher prices, the fact that they are still willing to buy means that they are still benefiting, right? Wrong. Getting a good deal on a purchase is not just a luxury that the economy can do without. It is the essence of what it means to enjoy a product, whether a theater ticket or a loaf of bread.
When consumers pay prices so high that they wonder whether the deal was worth it, the pleasure they get from the transaction is vanishingly small, because they must give up so much in order to gain access to the product. Because consumers still buy at such prices, the economy continues to grow, and indeed profits soar, but consumers are shut out of the fruits, engaged in joyless consumption, paying a pound of flesh for a pound of meat. By charging prices just low enough that consumers continue to buy, firms help consumers to destroy the lived value of their own wealth, which is why dynamic pricing is the euthanasia of the consumer.
Fortunately, this future has not quite arrived — firms are still learning how to categorize consumers into finer and finer groups – so some of us continue to enjoy good deals. Mankiw certainly got one, declaring that his ticket was “worth every penny.” Clearly, the scalper failed to charge him a price anywhere near the maximum he could afford.
One percenters like Mankiw suffer the least from dynamic pricing because there are so few of them, allowing them to hide among the merely affluent, and enjoy prices targeted at this less fortunate group, at least for now. Mankiw’s ticket was probably priced for lawyers or doctors, not forty-millionaires. The rest of us can try to hide too among the less fortunate, but the deals we get will not be as good, because our incomes do not differ as much from the incomes of other buyers in lower wealth segments.
Stewart observes that dynamic pricing “yields bargains along with premium prices.” But he does not seem to realize that these bargains are not by design. That $39 deal Stewart found for the show Donna Murphy was not meant for him, but for the American of median income – $53,889 — for whom $39 for a show is not something to write home about.
As firms get better at segmenting consumers, they will eventually be able to keep Stewart out of the economy seats, and to class Mankiw with other forty-millionaires, charging him enough ($100,000?) to make him think twice about declaring his good fortune to The New York Times.
Far from being anticapitalist, dynamic pricing eliminates some of the benefits of wealth, because it ensures that the more a consumer can afford, the more the consumer will be asked to pay. The practice takes us a step closer to the world of Marxist fable, in which each takes only according to his need. By contrast, rage at dynamic pricing reflects the rather capitalist desire of consumers to get the most out of their hard-earned cash.
So what should shows do? To their credit, shows have not yet used dynamic pricing to set prices as high as they could, which is why scalpers have made huge profits on resale. Rather than listen to Mankiw and try to capture the scalpers’ profits by raising their own prices, hit shows should fight the scalpers tooth and nail, on behalf of their audiences, perhaps by following the airlines in honoring only tickets presented by named purchasers. And then they should do the decent thing and start to charge prices that cover only their costs, including a reasonable return to investors, but not a penny more.
Stewart worries that without dynamic pricing, shows would be unable to pay their investors. But investors are just another production input, like sets or stagehands, each of which has a finite cost. Dynamic pricing is about what to do with what remains after those costs have been covered.
To be sure, profits from dynamic pricing could stimulate investment in more shows, but the profits also cause consumers paradoxically to derive less pleasure from those shows, as they are forced to give up more and more in order to get access to them.
The question, ultimately, is whether the audience should be made to exist for the show, or the show for the audience. Consumers already understand how that question has been answered by the airlines. As dynamic pricing spreads across the economy, from taxis to rental apartments, we must also soon ask that question of the entire economy. Broadway can take a stand. And consumers can either “get used to it,” as Stewart recommends, or rebel.
Nietzsche said that we feel guilty because we killed God. We feel this same guilt today over the killing of Nature, which gave us our earliest gods. The guilt is expressed in hand-wringing over climate change, the polar bears, meat-eating, and so on. We feel the profoundest self-loathing in the creeping realization that all life on earth has become servilely dependent upon us. The beasts stripped of their nobility and humiliated in parks, or as the subjects of conservation efforts.
Maybe the birth of the gods itself was an expression of this guilt. The Bering Straiters knew what they had wrought when they wiped out the mammoths. The islanders the elephant birds.
An important point that didn’t make it into my opinion article arguing that the FTC should unwind Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods is this: Most people don’t buy groceries online today, but eventually they will.
That’s why I wrote that Amazon’s website, along with its voice search service, Alexa, constitute an essential marketing platform, required for future survival in grocery retail. Whole Foods now has a huge advantage over all other grocery retailers in attracting the coming wave of online grocery shoppers, because most people already use Amazon as their default search engine for finding goods to buy online. When these people start embracing online grocery shopping, they’ll log into Amazon to find a way to do that. And all they will find is Whole Foods. Even giant Walmart is unlikely to solve this problem, because its own website attracts far fewer online shoppers.
The central role of online product search to the future of the grocery market explains why Walmart responded to the Whole Foods deal by partnering with Google to offer Walmart items on Google’s Alexa competitor — Google Assistant. Google isn’t dominant in product search, or in voice search, so while that partnership may help Walmart, it won’t eliminate Amazon’s promotional advantage.
If the FTC were to unwind this deal, Amazon could still get into groceries, but only as a search platform, allowing grocery retailers to offer delivery services through Amazon, much as Amazon already opens its fulfillment centers to third party sellers. That would give existing retailers a more equal shot at search visibility on Amazon’s website. If the FTC won’t unwind the deal, it should at least order Amazon to give all grocers visibility, by including their offerings on its website, alongside those of Whole Foods.
True, the Whole Foods deal should lead to more competition in grocery retail for the time being. In order for Amazon to leverage its product search dominance to win market share, it must charge prices low enough to avoid encouraging consumers to give up using Amazon as their search default. That explains why Amazon cut Whole Foods prices immediately after the acquisition. As long as those prices stay low, consumers will stick with Amazon, and as online ordering takes off, Whole Foods will expand its share of grocery retail.
That in itself is a problem, and enough for the FTC to intervene, because it means that Whole Foods will win not by charging better prices or offering a better product, but because it can match the prices and product quality offered by others, and then tip the scale in its favor through its dominance of online product search. Competition realizes its potential only when firms win by charging lower prices or offering products of better quality.
Consumers will end up choosing Whole Foods not because it is better, but because it’s not worse, with visibility on consumers’ favorite product search platform becoming the deciding factor in the decision which grocer to use. The FTC won another case in the 1980s on precisely this ground, arguing that the maker of the ReaLemon brand of lemon juice used its promotional advantage to win market share while charging competitive prices.
A second consequence is that if Whole Foods manages to run the competition into the ground, then it will be able to raise prices eventually. Entering the grocery retail market, even an online market, is expensive, requiring a huge distribution network connecting, among other things, large numbers of suppliers of perishables to the grocer. If Walmart and other grocery retailers disappear, their distribution systems will disappear with them. And any competitor wishing to enter the market in response to eventual price hikes by Whole Foods will have to rebuild distribution from scratch.
Of course, Amazon might fail to capitalize on its advantage. Brand loyalty, or the promotional advantage bricks-and-mortar retailers have in promoting their own online delivery services to consumers shopping in their stores, might cause consumers to gravitate to the retailers they use today when they start shopping more online.
But the promotional advantage created by access to online product search platforms is real, and is likely to play a role in all consumer product markets in the future, if it does not already. The EU was concerned about precisely that when it fined Google $13.7 billion in June for privileging its own product search engine over others in its search results. Until government starts to treat product search as an essential facility or a public utility, an essential playing field that must be level if competition is to take place on the characteristics we care about, like price and quality, this problem will persist.
The trouble with governance by markets is that self-interest is highly unreliable. The theory is that a firm’s owner will optimize management of the firm because it is in the financial self-interest of the owner to do so. But here we have Eddie Lampert, owner of Sears, phoning it in to Indiana from his home in Miami, and predictably driving the firm into the ground, losing himself billions.
If Sears were a government agency, and Lampert an appointee, he would have been fired, or reassigned, long ago, not least for failing to come to work. But because in the free market we bet everything on self-interest, when that fails we must watch paralyzed as an immense organization collapses, shedding jobs and undermaintained infrastructure as it goes down.
Yes, the market is disciplining Lampert in a sense, but at extraordinary cost in waste of assets, and disruption to workers’ lives, when the problem could be solved in a heartbeat for the price of a pink slip.
Algorithms may make collusion easier, by reducing the cost of monitoring and reacting to the behavior of other participants in an oligopoly. But even the fastest of algorithms can’t guarantee collusion, contrary to what Stucke and Ezrahi seem (p. 62-65) to suggest. After all, the classic model of the failure of collusion, the prisoner’s dilemma, is a simultaneous move game! And the best algorithms can do for oligopolists is to allow them to act simultaneously.
Suppose all the oligopolists in a market have super-fast algorithms that allow them to monitor the decisions of competitors and adjust accordingly. Then as soon as one firm adjusts for another firm’s decision, that other firm will adjust to the first firm’s adjustment. As adjustment times fall, the firms become unable to adjust to each others’ decisions, because they end up effectively all making their decisions at the same time.
That is precisely the setup of the basic prisoner’s dilemma game, in which no player observes the decisions of the other players in advance. The game shows that under this condition, rational firms will all choose to betray the oligopoly and charge a low price, because each firm will know that it is in the best interest of each of the other firms individually to betray the group as well.
The prisoner’s dilemma tells us that even in a world of infinitely fast algorithms, tacit collusion can fail.
Stucke and Ezrahi argue (pp. 56-64) that algorithms would facilitate oligopoly in gas station pricing because algorithms would allow each station to meet a price-cutter’s low prices before consumers have had a chance to drive over to the price-cutter to take advantage of those low prices. As a result, consumers would not flock to the price-cutter, but would buy at the low prices offered by their local gas stations instead, eliminating the reward for cutting and ensuring that all members of the oligopoly charge a high price.
What makes algorithms effective as an aid to oligopoly in this story is the inability of consumers instantaneously to take advantage of a price cut. But here’s the thing: the same technology that makes quick price changes possible also makes quick purchase decisions possible. By offering consumers the ability to use an app to commit to a low price as soon as it is offered, or to have gas delivered to their car, a price-cutter can lock in volume generated by betraying the oligopoly.
That puts us back in the prisoner’s dilemma.
I don’t mean to say that algorithms never facilitate oligopoly pricing — they may well do so today for gas stations, because the technology that would allow consumers to fight back is still in its infancy. My point is only that there’s no necessary relationship between the speed of algorithms and harm to competition.