Michael Giberson Ticket scalping, like price gouging, is a usually pro-social market activity that is stuck with a pejorative name. At Swifter, Higher, sportswriter Kyle Whelliston writes about his experience picking up a cheap ticket into the first hockey game of the Vancouver Olympics. It wasn’t as easy as he hoped, but at a cost …
Michael Giberson Al Roth, at Market Design, points out an inadvertently amusing column from The Guardian a few weeks back, “Our speechless outrage demands a new language of the common good.” The writer, Madeleine Bunting, asserts that economists of a certain sort (namely, Friedrich Hayek and his associates at Chicago in the 50s) came to …
Michael Giberson The post title was extracted from the conclusion of Henry Neilson’s article, “Price gouging versus price reduction in retail gasoline markets during Hurricane Rita” (Economic Letters, October 2009), but I’m not sure the evidence supports the conclusion of altruism. Neilson collected gasoline price data in the Byran-College Station, Texas, area for several weeks …
“Gas Station Owners Were Surprisingly Altruistic During That Time of Crisis” Read More »
Michael Giberson Vero Beach, Florida, could become a hothouse of dynamic competition in retail electric power, if only the city would follow the recommendations of economist Dom Armentano. According to the Vero Beach [Florida] Electric Utility, they aim to provide “reliable, cost competitive electrical energy and services to our customers in a manner that exceeds …
Michael Giberson From the Buffalo, New York, BusinessFirst: In a letter sent May 13 by FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz to Higgins, the agency said after a careful and extensive investigation, regulators could not find any evidence of illegal activity in gasoline markets in any of the affected cities. The agency monitored prices in Buffalo, Jamestown, …
Congressman to Western New York Gasoline Retailers: We Will Be Watching You Read More »
Michael Giberson Yes, Texas has a price gouging law, and yes the Attorney General recently has issued a press release warning against price gouging – actually multiple press releases (Sept 16, Sept 19, Sept 24; a second press release of Sept 16 noted that state hotel tax collections were suspended for persons displaced by Hurricane …
Michael Giberson Now normally I wouldn’t be the kind of guy that looks to politicians for economic advice (e.g. posting on price gouging), but on his blog Alan Jewell points out an article from the December 2004 Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis showing that as a group senators have done abnormally well at picking …
Lynne Kiesling The outright demagoguery from DC is disgusting but not surprising. More FTC studies of “price gouging”, more threats of “windfall profits” taxes, more ranting and puffery. Ladies and gentlemen (and I use that moniker to be polite, not truthful) of Congress, look within yourselves if you want a true explanation for the increase …
Michael Giberson Which business would you rather be in, one in which the price of your product is rocketing upwards, or one in which the price is slowly drifting down? “Rockets” and “feathers” are names characterizing a pair of stylized facts about the usual behavior of retail gasoline prices: when prices are going up, they …
Lynne Kiesling As you’ve by now inferred, we’ve made the exec-you-tee-vo decision to change to Title Case on titles at KP. Many thanks for the input I got from several of you, public and otherwise. I think what swung the decision was the ability to reserve all caps for times when we want the emphasis, …
Copyright © 2022 Knowledge Problem Archive