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Notes -
Can you elaborate?
Exponential distribution: most units sold at a low price, some sold at a moderate one, with a long tail of exorbitant prices.
I don’t think that it’s actually optimal, but it conveys the idea of price discrimination.
Exactly - there are consumers to whom $50k is perceptually the same as $1k to the average consumer - if Apple could sell them a model of iphone for $50k to take advantage of that without the inevitable backlash, they would.
And there are manufacturers that do sell phones in that price range and above, like Vertu. There are customers for whom for wealth signaling purposes the device can actually be objectively worse they would still pay more. Some of the most expensive Vertu phones are dumb phones; a less useful device than the phone your average african has in his pockets.
It's a bit like watches, a cheap quartz watch just plain makes for a more useful watch than an automatic. But for phones, I don't know, it's even more outrageous to me since unlike watches, a phone has a limited useful life, even if you could replace parts like batteries that wear off. Phones stop being able to give even the most basic services as providers sunset legacy protocols or require newer ones like VoLTE.
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