There are a limited number of iPhones....?
Do either of those examples shed light on where Coase went wrong that agree or disagree with the authors?
If that fails. Coase's argument fails. No?
I mean, with any theoretical modeling, you have to assume that the market actually fits the theory's requirements, right? From what I can gather just reading about it, the market the Coase conjecture model requires is one with a fixed set of consumers, a homogeneous durable good, and a monopolistic seller. But the real ebook market has a constant influx of new consumers, substitute content, complex contract structures, and, crucially, promotional events and coupons.
So in the end, I think we have to understand it as something that only holds under very specific conditions, not something that maps neatly onto real world cases.
That said, I'm curious. If you were to model the ebook market in general, what would the high impact variables be, and which ones would have relatively little influence?
But what I don't get is, are there even that many markets where the Coase conjecture actually holds? I'm not so sure.
I mean, you take reality and you turn it into a theoretical model. So my question is, are there really that many markets out there that fit the Coase conjecture in the first place? Sometimes when I read stuff about economics, it feels like people slice up the variable modeling to only look at what they want to see, and only in the regions they want to see, and then they claim it's universal. Of course, counterexamples keep popping up. And that's why it always feels so shaky.
skrebbel•1h ago
EDIT I still don’t understand it, I think. My read is: someone named Coase theorized that monopolists of durable goods will actually sell their products at marginal cost because of some weird mind game with their customers (the obvious unwritten corollary being that monopolies are fine). This is obviously untrue and we all know plenty of examples (pharma anyone? plenty pills are mega durable). Nevertheless, somehow economists cheered at this theory and called it beautiful, despite how obviously ridiculous it is. But now the authors of this post debunked it with real data to, I hope, nobody’s surprise.
That can’t be it, can it?
zaphar•43m ago
grumbelbart2•38m ago
Buyers don't just pop up on timestamp zero and remain unchanged. They anticipate price changes, potential new buyers come in, the market is dynamic.
I also don't understand why this only affects monopolies. The same logic should dictate that all products and services fall towards MC?
AnimalMuppet•35m ago
eru•8m ago
The authors themselves had the same reaction.
It's similar to physics: you make small simple models, you investigate what they say, you compare to what you get in reality, and then you make adjustments.
The interesting bit is: what kinds of friction or airpressure or shape do you need to add to your pig to recover what parts of reality?
myrmidon•38m ago
Consider e.g. Steam (digital video games): Prices are discounted over time because of "greed" (=> desire to sell the same product to customers that value it less than the first wave).
Customers do adapt to this, and expect future discounts (sales) at release date already, and defer their purchase accordingly (despite valueing it higher!).
But in reality, customers are not 100% rational, don't have perfect information (on seller strategy), and the product value (to buyers) changes over time too (typically mostly downward), so the base assumptions are difficult to find in reality.
lrasinen•30m ago
The gist of the conjecture is that if the customers can wait out for price drops and the monopolist wants to sell their thing, then after a few rounds of "he knows that we know that..." the price ends up to be the marginal cost.
Now, real world disagrees with the model, so next steps are to examine why this happens and maybe discover some new economic interaction.
0zer0•26m ago
There is durable good which means that consumers will only buy once (pharma doesn't seem to fit here).
And there is the monopolist. So there shouldn't be any outside options, as the last paragraph claims in the OP.
And the marginal costs seem to be constant. Which is only the case for things like data or software. For most goods, however, one needs to invest in production facilities to increase output for a bigger number of goods. In this case the marginal costs will increase as well and so it would make sense to first sell a lower number of goods for a higher price.
Somehow, it doesn't quite add up for me, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is. It reminds me of the unexpected hanging paradox.