5 ms·

I find it equally facile to rely on the market to set the price when dealing with an industry that has a history of price fixing and collusion...

tptacek 16y ago
How exactly do publishers get to fix the price of books on the Internet? If you want to sell a book below $9.99, what's stopping you? What am I missing about this comment? I am asking seriously: 6 people voted it up, and my read is that it's content-free. I'm willing to believe I'm simply wrong about it and I missed a subtlety, but I'd sure like to know what it is.
- shasta 16y ago
  Price fixing is when parties coordinate to set the prices of their items. It doesn't matter that you're able to sell your books at any price -- if two or more publishers got together and agreed not to cut prices below a certain point, then they were engaged in price fixing, by definition. I'm not really sure what your point was. Was it that a self published $2.99 Jabba the Hut fan fiction novelette proves that collusion isn't influencing ebook prices?
  - tptacek 16y ago
    Why does all self-published work need to be of the quality of Jabba the Hut fan fiction? You see my point but have decided to caricature it. I look at this situation and see it as evidence that the days of large publishers acting as gatekeepers for authorship are limited. You seem to look at the same situation and see it as an injustice that merits some kind of intervention at publishers to change the price of publisher-approved books. I do not agree; further, I think it's impossible to hold your viewpoint in 2011 and at the same time say you believe in markets.
    - shasta 16y ago
      You're putting words into my mouth -- I didn't say anything about what regulation I favor. First and foremost, I was just pointing out that whether there was price fixing is independent of how widespread the price fixing was, or whether there were alternatives, or to what extent it affected prices in the rest of the market. But the now great great grandparent's point about collusion interfering with fair market value was valid and becomes more true the smaller the number of major players there are in a market. The collusion doesn't even have to be explicit. Cutting prices hurts everyone in the market if everyone does it. My reference to Jabba the Hut fiction was hyperbolic, but I do think the smaller players (and thus typically the ones with lower quality) tend to be the ones that don't join in on the collusion. I certainly don't believe in the infallibility of markets. I don't spend too much thinking about economics, but one thought I've had is that we should tax collusion -- make companies pay a tax proportional to, say, the logarithm of their number of employees / worth, and otherwise keep things pretty laissez-faire (with regulation where needed).

tptacek 16y ago

How exactly do publishers get to fix the price of books on the Internet? If you want to sell a book below $9.99, what's stopping you? What am I missing about this comment? I am asking seriously: 6 people voted it up, and my read is that it's content-free. I'm willing to believe I'm simply wrong about it and I missed a subtlety, but I'd sure like to know what it is.

shasta 16y ago
Price fixing is when parties coordinate to set the prices of their items. It doesn't matter that you're able to sell your books at any price -- if two or more publishers got together and agreed not to cut prices below a certain point, then they were engaged in price fixing, by definition. I'm not really sure what your point was. Was it that a self published $2.99 Jabba the Hut fan fiction novelette proves that collusion isn't influencing ebook prices?
- tptacek 16y ago
  Why does all self-published work need to be of the quality of Jabba the Hut fan fiction? You see my point but have decided to caricature it. I look at this situation and see it as evidence that the days of large publishers acting as gatekeepers for authorship are limited. You seem to look at the same situation and see it as an injustice that merits some kind of intervention at publishers to change the price of publisher-approved books. I do not agree; further, I think it's impossible to hold your viewpoint in 2011 and at the same time say you believe in markets.
  - shasta 16y ago
    You're putting words into my mouth -- I didn't say anything about what regulation I favor. First and foremost, I was just pointing out that whether there was price fixing is independent of how widespread the price fixing was, or whether there were alternatives, or to what extent it affected prices in the rest of the market. But the now great great grandparent's point about collusion interfering with fair market value was valid and becomes more true the smaller the number of major players there are in a market. The collusion doesn't even have to be explicit. Cutting prices hurts everyone in the market if everyone does it. My reference to Jabba the Hut fiction was hyperbolic, but I do think the smaller players (and thus typically the ones with lower quality) tend to be the ones that don't join in on the collusion. I certainly don't believe in the infallibility of markets. I don't spend too much thinking about economics, but one thought I've had is that we should tax collusion -- make companies pay a tax proportional to, say, the logarithm of their number of employees / worth, and otherwise keep things pretty laissez-faire (with regulation where needed).