The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [121]
33-37 Searching for Fools: The quote on fools by Daniel Kahneman is found in Lee Young Han and Ulrike Malmendier, “The Bidder’s Curse,” NBER Working Paper, December 2007. The attitude of private-equity firms toward auctions comes from “Auction Process Roundtable,” Mergers and Acquisitions, December 2006, pp. 31-32. Prices paid by Denver shoppers are found in Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst, “Lifecycle Prices and Production,” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Discussion Paper, July 2005. The price of appetizers in romantic restaurants is discussed in I. P. L. Png and Wang Hao, “Buyer Uncertainty and Two-Part Pricing of Felicitous vis-à-vis Distress Goods: Theory with Evidence from New York Restaurants,” Working Paper, April 2008. Airline ticket pricing is discussed in Severin Borenstein and Nancy L. Rose, “How Airline Markets Work . . . Or Do They? Regulatory Reform in the Airline Industry,” NBER Working Paper, September 2007; and Steven Puller, Anirban Sengupta, and Steven Wiggins, “Testing Theories of Scarcity Pricing in the Airline Industry,” NBER Working Paper, December 2009. Evidence of price discrimination in the concert industry is in Pascal Courty and Mario Pagliero, “The Impact of Price Discrimination on Revenue: Evidence from the Concert Industry,” CEPR Discussion Paper, January 2009; and Pascal Courty and Mario Pagliero, “Price Discrimination in the Concert Industry,” CEPR Discussion Paper, January 2009. Price discrimination by Coke from Constance Hays, “Variable-Price Coke Machine Being Tested,” New York Times, October 28, 1999. Price discrimination by Amazon from Joseph Turow, Lauren Feldman, and Kimberly Meltzer, “Open to Exploitation: American Shoppers Online and Offline,” University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center, June 2005 (http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/Downloads/Information_And_Society/Turow_APPC_Report_WEB_FINAL. pdf. , accessed 08/01/2010). Data on airlines’ falling fares and financial problems is found in Air Transport Association, Annual Passenger Yield (http://www.airlines.org/Economics/DataAnalysis/Pages/AnnualPassengerYieldUSAirlines.aspx, accessed 08/13/2010); and Bureau of Transportation Statistics (http://www.TranStats.bts.gov/Data_Elements.aspx?Data=6, accessed 08/13/2010).
38-39 Protect Us from What We Buy: The dubious value of presents is found in Joel Waldfogel, “Does Consumer Irrationality Trump Consumer Sovereignty?,” Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 87, No. 4, 2005, pp. 691-696. Price fans will pay for basketball tickets from Ziv Carmon and Dan Ariely, “Focusing on the Forgone: How Value Can Appear So Different to Buyers and Sellers,” Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 27, December 2000, pp. 360-370; and Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester, “Always Leave Home Without It: A Further Investigation of the Credit Card Effect on Willingness to Pay,” Marketing Letters, Vol. 12, 2001, pp. 5-12. The story about the invention of ninety-nine-cent stores is in Tim Arango, “Bet Your Bottom Dollar on 99 Cents,” New York Times, February 8, 2009. Kahneman’s opinion on paternalistic interventions is found in Daniel Kahneman, “New Challenges to the Rationality Assumption,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, Vol. 150, No. 1, 1994, pp. 18-36.
40-41 The Price of Life: The Jewish teachings are mentioned in Peter Singer, “Why We Must Ration Health Care,” New York Times Magazine, July 19, 2009. The various prices placed on life come from Chris Dockins, Kelly Maguire, Nathalie Simon, and Melonie Sullivan, “Value of Statistical Life Analysis and Environmental Policy,” White Paper for Presentation to Science Advisory Board—Environmental Economics Advisory Committee, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Center for Environmental Economics, April 21, 2004; United Kingdom