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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5461 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for April 2023

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

@ymeskhout:

@gattsuru:

@johnfabian:

Contributions for the week of April 3, 2023

@Soriek:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@grendel-khan:

@ymeskhout:

Recognition Diplomacy

@naraburns:

@07mk:

@FiveHourMarathon:

Contributions for the week of April 10, 2023

@HlynkaCG:

@TracingWoodgrains:

@FlyingLionWithABook:

@Soriek:

@RandomRanger:

Transitive Reasoning

@Lewyn:

@self_made_human:

@roystgnr:

@RandomRanger:

@TracingWoodgrains:

Contributions for the week of April 17, 2023

@gattsuru:

@ControlsFreak:

@faul_sname:

Identity Politics

@throwawaygendertheorist:

@RenOS:

@SophisticatedHillbilly:

@FCfromSSC:

Contributions for the week of April 24, 2023

@naraburns:

@faul_sname:

@Dean:

@self_made_human:

Discriminating Taste

@RenOS:

@Unsaying:

@Esperanza:

@FCfromSSC:

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

@laxam:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

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Sure. I wholeheartedly agree that in some instances price discrimination is better for both consumers and producers simultaneously. Especially when costs are nonlinear as in your example.

But in other cases it's bad for consumers (as a whole, every case will have a few specific individuals who benefits at the lowest end of the curve who wouldn't be served without price discrimination, but the average consumer ends up worse off)

And producers with perfect knowledge have no incentive to pick and choose only to use it when it benefits customers. And I don't think it's necessary to demand such a strong burden on them. If scenario A has $500 consumer surplus and $500 producer surplus, while scenario B has $400 consumer surplus and $1000 producer surplus, it doesn't seem unreasonable to allow them to do scenario B without getting upset at them. But if scenario C has $1 consumer surplus and $2000 producer surplus... I feel like something has gone wrong. Like, it's economically efficient on a global scale, the total surplus is higher. But it violates intuitive notions of "fairness" in ways that lead to poverty and discontent. Note that utility is nonlinear with respect to money. A thousand people with $10,000 each will be more happy/healthy/fulfilled/content/secure on average than 999 broke people and 1 person with $10 million.

Maybe if we could figure out a way to losslessly tax them and redistribute some of the profits back to consumers this would be fine? But I'm skeptical of "lossless taxation" on producer surplus being possible. I feel like a more organic market solution involving competition and balanced bargaining power would be better, where prices are set in between customer's values and producer costs such that both could extract nontrivial fractions of the surplus.

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