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Dangit Ronpaul posted:All price gouging during a shortage does is shift the allocation of goods from those who happen to show up first to those who have the most money. Whether or not this is an improvement is more of an ethical question than an economic one. It also tends to discourage hoarding by making it too expensive to buy more than one absolutely needs, but just limiting the amount each person can buy would probably be more effective at doing that, although it would also be much less profitable for the seller. But if you can't or don't want to directly limit purchase amounts, price gouging provides a free markety (and more profitable) disincentive to overbuying. There's also an argument that in a genuine emergency where it is difficult to supply certain good or services, the prospect of price gouging provides an incentive to commit extra effort and resources to supplying that market, rather than just abandoning it until conditions improve.
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Jan 6, 2015 17:19
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Vox Nihili posted:Ha, Uber would then throw away the key to its success: displacing the costs of purchasing/maintaining/gassing vehicles onto the drivers. Uber would have to own and maintain its own fleet, which would fundamentally alter the structure of the company. They would have to get at least some actual, real-life employees and infrastructure to refuel, house their fleet, etc. Not necessarily! Some techno-utopianists and techno-libertarians think that the endgame of self-driving cars is people's own private self-driving cars acting as taxis when their owner isn't using them - dropping you off at work, then running off to transport people around all day until you finish work, at which point it returns to act as your car for a while; once you're done and go home for the night, it ventures off into the dark to go haul drunks around. A few of the craziest ones even think it'll replace public transport. It sounds stupid as hell, but it's basically exactly Uber's business model, except that the owner doesn't have to be in the car, and it's done while the owner is busy rather than during their free time. That's almost certainly Uber's goal - rather than maintaining their own fleet of robot cars, they'll market a robo-Uber service to driverless car owners, serenading them with sweet talk about their car going out and earning them some bonus cash all on its own while they're working or sleeping.
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Feb 6, 2015 03:39
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