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by dahart
1484 days ago
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> Assuming the scalpers are able to sell their supply, what they’re charging is the market price. Are you trying to suggest the situation is somehow optimal? Market prices in short supply situations cause market inefficiencies, and this is one of them. The old platitude is that this inefficiency is only less bad than what would happen otherwise. Of course that thinking is rarely put forth with careful thinking about the alternatives, nor admissions of the many times in history that preventing inefficiencies actually worked. Wouldn’t it be better if Sony received the market value themselves, and invested the money in the PS6? Wouldn’t it be better if we were not encouraging people who add negative value to the system to create artificial scarcity merely for the purposes of extracting extra dollars? The problem with your argument is that for markets to be free, customers need both choice and access to information, and supply needs to be able to meet demand. Scalpers hoarding are effectively an anti-free-market force on top of inducing inefficiency for profit. It’s a schadenfreudey bonus when scalpers get stuck with supply because they overestimated demand, but that doesn’t actually amount to a market correction, it just adds even more inefficiency, money wasted on top of money wasted. |
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Of course. The best outcome would have been for them to start with something like a cosmetically different "founders edition" that's more expensive and then to release the normal version when supply becomes available. But they decided not do to that, probably because the same people screaming about scalpers would vilify them for "price gouging" (which for nonessential products is a silly concept).
Wouldn’t it be better if we were not encouraging people who add negative value to the system to create artificial scarcity
The scarcity isn't artificial. There are more people who want to buy a PS5 at MSRP than there are PS5s. Scalpers are only adding to scarcity if they're sitting on inventory they're not selling, which there's no incentive for them to do.
The problem with your argument is that for markets to be free, customers need both choice and access to information
What choice or information do customers lack? If you want a PS5 your choices are to pay market price to a scalper, or spend a lot of time watching stores or running bots and trying to get lucky. This is all widely known.
Are you trying to suggest the situation is somehow optimal?
Obviously the optimal situation is for the shortage to be eliminated. The next best is for Sony to charge the market-clearing price. With both of those off the table, then probably the current situation is the best available. Do you have a better solution?