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Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of April 3, 2023
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Contributions for the week of April 10, 2023
Transitive Reasoning
Contributions for the week of April 17, 2023
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Contributions for the week of April 24, 2023
- "What is going in Sudan is a practical demonstration that being a global power does not mean that everything going on in the world is secretly about you."
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In a medical context, price discrimination means the difference between getting medical treatment and not getting medical treatment. If I can only afford to pay $1,000 at most for medical treatment, and I'm in serious pain or dying, and treatment costs $50,000 for everybody then I'm going to go without treatment, or go for treatment and be saddled with medical debt. If the doctor price discriminates, then I can get treatment for $1,000 which is better than going without and better than being saddled with $49,000 worth of debt.
Most doctors do this de-facto anyway, if someone owes a clinic $10,000 and they say they can't pay they'll usually cut a deal where they pay $500 and the doc writes off the rest. Very common. Because money in hand is worth more than money owed that you'll never collect on. Those who can afford to pay their bills pay them, those who can't pay what they can.
You say that you can only afford $1k, but your parents are awfully rich, and you have an up-and-coming career, and isn't that some savings there? That'll be $5k up front and a payment plan for an additional $30k, please. Aren't you so grateful for the discount from $50k? Never mind that the procedure would've been <$20k if they had to set it by cost+ or by profit-maximizing single price, or some other system.
It's a two step process: the base price is raised (but almost nobody pays it), then the cost is selectively lowered to near-zero-utility based on a lot of private information. It would be great for the consumer if it wasn't for that first step, though.
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Now do food.
Suppose there is a food cartel that has gained sufficient market power that they could restrict output, raise prices, and profit according to standard monopoly theory. If you are in a position where you can't afford food, you're going to go without food or you're going to be saddled with food debt. If the food cartel perfectly price discriminates, then you can get food for exactly your willingness-to-pay (i.e., you have basically nothing left for any other aspect of the Good Life).
This is the threat that the cartel issues in order to get you to be willing to have the government come in and hand them the tools to price discriminate perfectly. But that's all it is. It's a threat. Blackmail. From their position of market power.
You're right that once we've gotten ourselves into such an abhorrent situation with the food cartel, maybe it's an appealing trade-off. But hot damn is the vastly better deal to break the food cartel, create a competitive market, watch the price of food fall to the marginal rate of production, and see everyone eat plenty of cheap food and have money left over for, like, flatscreen TVs or whatever.
This is sort of the point of my OP. We see this progression of reasoning happening over and over again in all these domains where the gov't comes in; they subsidize demand, restrict supply, create a de facto cartel, completely destroying the competitive market. Then, when your back is against the wall and all seems lost, they issue the threat. "Just let us take all the surplus now; it'll be epsilon better for the poorer part of the population." And they're right! It is epsilon better for the poorer population (and significantly worse for the richer part of the population).
The real problem is that you put yourself in such a vulnerable position to such a threat. That you let the gov't subsidize demand, restrict supply, and set up a de facto cartel. The first best solution is to undo all of that shit. The second best solution is to observe on the internet how the same dynamic that results in this threat seems to keep materializing over and over again. A distant third is to just give in to the threat, trading what's left of consumer surplus for the richer part of the population in exchange for an epsilon improvement for the poorer part of the population.
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I don't think you're using my premises.
Let's set aside life threatening scenarios, because I'm not entirely sure how my argument interfaces with them, and trying to assign personal valuations to them probably ends up with infinity dollars or something silly. Similarly, let's set aside issues of bankruptcy, and issues of involuntary treatment. And assume we're dealing with amounts of money which a person either can afford, or can afford by going into debt that they eventually mostly pay off. The clinic will treat its sale price as the amount of money they actually expect to receive from someone.
I'm fine with conceding that limited price discrimination can have positive effects, as you point out. But I'm specifically referring to perfect or near perfect price discrimination. That is, there is some level X, such that you are perfectly indifferent between receiving no treatment, and receiving treatment that costs $X. If it cost $10 million dollars and put you in debt for the rest of your life, you'd be better off untreated and saving your money, so X is less than 10 million. If it cost $1 you'd be better off with treatment, so X is greater than $1. Intermediate value theorem, or iterate, or whatever, we find some finite value, which differs from person to person based on some combination of their finances, how bad the injury i, how much they hate being in debt, how much social support they have, etc, at which they are perfectly indifferent, the scenario in which they go untreated is exactly the same value as the scenario in which they pay X and get treated. The treatment increases their utility by the exact same amount that losing $X decreases their utility, so if they paid $X for treatment they have gained nothing on net. If the clinic has some cost C for the procedure, then they are willing to charge any amount P > C. The client is willing to pay any amount P < X. Therefore any price P with the property C < P < X is mutually acceptable to both parties. The clinic profits P - C, the client "profits" X - P, and both are greater than zero. A normal sane version of price discrimination would pick some value near the middle of the interval (C,X), such that both have nontrivial profit.
However, if the clinic has perfect knowledge of X, and is selfish, they will pick some amount trivially less than X. The doctor is only going to charge you $1000 if their costs are less than $1000 and that is every last cent you have to your name or can scrounge up by going into debt. Take whatever money is the most you could possibly be willing to part with to undergo the procedure, such that if it cost a single dollar more you'd be better off untreated, and the doctor charges you exactly that much, such that the monetary cost to you is so painful it's only a tiny bit. By definition, if the person is benefiting a nontrivial amount from the transaction, we are not in this scenario. I am defining "perfect price discrimination" to be this, this is not itself an argument.
My argument can be broken down as:
1: Perfect Price Discrimination as defined is as coherent concept and isn't some contradiction of terms.
2: Perfect Price Discrimination would follow from a perfectly rational/selfish producer with perfect knowledge of their client's utility function.
3: Perfect Price Discrimination is a tiny bit better for each clients than a scenario in which they are not served at all, but worse than any other pricing mechanism in which they are served (because it gives them the least possible nonzero surplus), including imperfect price discrimination.
4: Price Discrimination scenarios increasingly approach Perfect Price Discrimination as a price discriminating producer gains more knowledge.
On this last point, if the client has some imperfect knowledge of clients, like maybe it bins them into "poor" "average" and "rich" then maybe it sets up three prices, like $1k, $10k, $100k. Then all the poor people who value the treatment at $3k can benefit because they're only paying $1k for a treatment that improves their lives by $3k, but they couldn't afford the $10k cost, so they're genuinely better off by not having to reject treatment. Average people who value it $15k will benefit by $5k, because the price is lower than their valuation. Someone who by sheer coincidence values the treatment at $10,001 is screwed, because they'll be charged $10k and receive a trivial benefit, but if the prices are spaced out enough such people will be rare.
But if the producer gains enough data to accurately bin people by thousand dollars, ie it can detect and set prices at $1k, 2k, $3k..., then we're in worse shape. Now if someone has, say $3500 valuation, they pay $3k and only get $500 benefit. If someone has $23232 valuation, they pay $23k and get $232 benefit.
If the producer gains enough data to accurately bin people by tens of dollars, then nobody can benefit by more than ten dollars.
I'm not so much arguing that such extremes are realistic, I don't think a person themselves could accurately assign a monetary value to how much they would benefit from an action X even after having already received it, since they would have to compare to a counterfactual scenario in which they hadn't received it and had kept their money. But more information allowing for more accurate price discrimination can, in many cases, lead to lower consumer benefits. If you were previously in a scenario where you "couldn't afford" something (in the sense of it not being worth the money, not whether you literally have enough money), and the price discrimination puts it into an acceptable price then you're some amount better off. But if you were previously in a scenario where it was worth it, the price discrimination raises prices on you, squeezing out your value and making you worse off. And this happens incrementally, such that one supper accurate price discrimination is comparable to an initial discrimination that makes everyone be able to afford it, followed by a bunch of subsequent discrimination that squeeze all the value out. You seem to be under the impression that price discrimination = lowered prices, but it also means raised prices. You might consider it an incremental raising and lowering of prices on every single person until as much value as possible is squeezed out while still giving them barely enough to keep them consenting to the transaction.
At the extremes. I'm not attempting to apply my argument to all possible scenarios of price discrimination or suggest that it's always bad. Just that it can be bad when taken to extremes.
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