Post #3669023

This text by @Koenfucius@mastodon.social is short sighted, and, dare I say, naive. Explaining surge pricing with "getting closer to the real value" is mystifying the whole process in a "invisible hand" kind of way. Yet, in practice, it is pretty easy to explain: 1) Surge pricing is an easy way of extracting more money from the same resource base, it maximises revenue across the demand/supply curve. 2) The reason people hate it is because it is inherently unfair. Access is not determined by supply, but by monetary resources which often are outside one's control to a large degree. 3) The real value of something is often way beyond the price of an object. Think about things you have to buy but hate doing so (clothes for example in my case). If clothes shops would start surge pricing, it would effectively render my personal value of clothes even less than before. Value is a shit construct, especially when including it in weird moderating mechanics into transactional processes. It would be easier to explain such processes with Desirability and Affordability graphs. https://koenfucius.substack.com/p/the-value-of-everything