Popular Mechanics magazine headlined an article with the question, “One year after Superstorm Sandy, has anything changed?”
Well, sure: over the last year the state governments in New York and New Jersey have put a lot of time and money into punishing a few businesses that provided shelter and gasoline to people whose lives were disrupted by the storm. Why, you ask? Because the prices offered by these businesses after the storm hit were somewhat higher than the prices offered by the businesses before the storm hit.
One example, a Holiday Inn Express in Brooklyn recently agreed to pay a total of $40,000 to settle a complaint, part of it to customers and part to the state, because the state concluded the $400+/night rate charged to the customers was too much higher than the $170/night rate charged the week earlier.
As is perhaps obvious, government prosecution of post-emergency price-raising retailers will produce real world consequences. The question for economists is whether on balance the costs of the policies are worth the benefit secured. So far as I know there is no study that tries to answer this question in a comprehensive manner. (Best effort so far: here.)
In related news, the New York Attorney General’s office has reached an agreement with four charities that had collected money to help Sandy victims but not yet spent all of the funds. Under the agreement the four groups committed to a time table for spending most of the remaining funds.
Charities and for-profit enterprises both have provided many useful goods and services to people whose lives were disrupted by Sandy. If the soft price cap imposed by price gouging restrictions reduces for-profit supply responses during emergencies, then the restrictions add to the hardships that charities seek to address (and perhaps also to public demands that government do something, even something foolish).
At Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Matt Zwolinski continues to explore price gouging issues in a couple of recent posts. In “Price gouging and the poor” he takes on the common claim that state laws against price gouging are particularly valuable for protecting poor persons. In “World Cup ‘price gouging’?” he examines the Brazilian government’s declaration it will monitor hotel room prices for the upcoming 2014 World Cup competition and act to prevent abuses. Given that most people willing and able to travel internationally to attend World Cup matches in Brazil next year are far from poor, the two posts make a nice pair. (Related is my February 2012 post “Super Bowl price gouging complaints.”)