Peter Klein at the Organizations and Markets blog has an interesting post questioning why regulators, industry groups, and consumer representatives are resistant to rationing by the price mechanism. Why don't we use prices to help allocate goods like airport landing slots and Internet bandwidth?
As everyone's favorite Managerial Economics text notes, "prices are the primary mechanism that market participants use to communicate with one another." When you remove this communication mechanism from the market, you end up with problems like those Klein mentions: shortages, delays, congestion, and misallocation.
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