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> In a non-commodity market, price is determined by value, not cost. Cost is irrelevant. What is the "value" you're talking about here? Certainly not fair mar
by shasta 16y ago
> In a non-commodity market, price is determined by value, not cost. Cost is irrelevant.
What is the "value" you're talking about here? Certainly not fair market value, when DRM and device lock-in leave little semblance of a free market. Or maybe you mean utility to the purchaser, but that varies wildly.
- tptacek 16y agoI mean utility to the purchaser.
- shasta 16y agoThat's not a single number, it's a distribution, and it's much more complicated than that since the distribution of prices people are willing to pay for any particular item depends on the prices of the other items in the store.
- tptacek 16y agoYes. Welcome to marketing. Your last sentence is an instance of price points. Yes, price points are part of what goes into perceived value. If you want to break out of a price point, you have many opportunities to change packaging, promotion, or pricing models to do that. Clearly, for example, textbooks don't honor book store price points. Neither do magazines or serialized books. Neither do standards documents or technical books (as graphically illustrated upthread by the $6,000 metals book). Neither do graphic novels. The 250-page bound novel is also an artifact of the book store distribution channel. It may indeed be that to command a $20 price instead of a $9.99 Kindle standard price, authors will need to break out of the straightjacket of 250 page bound novels.
- shasta 16y agoMy point was just that there is no simple "value" that determines the price point. One of the factors that determines the price of things is unit cost, commodity or no.