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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27109 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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You make me a liar, fine, I'll go through the circumstances. These are some of the things that make predatory pricing possible:

  1. High barrier to entry and high barrier to exit. If you can just recoup your high entry costs by selling off the capital then the high barrier to entry doesn't matter much. Or if its a factory making X widgets, and you can just retool it to make Y widgets instead it also doesn't matter.
  2. Existing market domination. You have to already be the top company in the market. AND if there are high barriers to entry and exit it means other companies in the market are more likely to hold on until the last moments.
  3. Demand for product has to be inelastic (note: demand for a type of good might be inelastic, even if all specific goods in that category have elastic demand, such as food. Everyone needs food, but different crops and meats can all be partial substitute for each other). Inelastic product markets are very rare to begin with. They also tend to have lots of competition since everyone likes being a seller in an inelastic market.
  4. Usage for the product has to be limited. Some products can be used in other ways when the price is low enough. If the product has other usages, then the low pricing will lead to it being used in those other things and the attempt to "flood the market" will fail. This contradicts the inelastic demand. Most products with inelastic demand have that inelasticity because they are used in a wide range of things. Like base resources metals/oil/minerals/etc.
  5. Storage and recycling of the product needs to be difficult. If storage or recycling is easy, then other people can store or recycle it when the company is selling it cheap, and offload it when they start to increase prices again.

The factors that make predatory pricing possible are almost all contradictory. For it to be possible also makes it unlikely.

This conversation has gone down too many sublevels, and I feel that I have said all that needs to be said on the topic. I'm done with it. I'll read any response you have on this topic but I won't be responding anymore.

The demand doesn't really have to be elastic. It has to be elastic to the point that after the public buys all the lower priced versions from the big company, they'll still buy the regular priced versions from its competitors. That is, it has to be elastic at the margin where the remaining products are regular priced. If it was elastic like that, the regular market without predatory pricing would also have been elastic, which is unlikely since it would have expanded until it no longer was.

As for your point about storage, most people don't behave like homo economicus and won't stock up like that. And to the extent that they do, it not only makes it harder for the big company to sell at high prices, it also makes it harder for lower priced competitors to enter the market again, so it works in both directions, not just against the big company.

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