Two-way Bundling

Here is the pricing schedule from a recent trip to Dolmabahçe Palace. Note that the average price per person falls for families and that the price per museum visited falls as you bundle the Official Part with the Family House.

The Economics of Panhandling

how economists see the world, article here

HT:  MarginalRevolution.com

Models are tools

Slideshow on the use of macroeconomic models that reminds me why I study micro.

Swearing as a signal

Signals are convey information only if they are costly to use.  Otherwise, it too difficult to interpret what they mean.

To see this, consider what you learn when you hear someone use the F-word.  Some of my friends use it almost as punctuation, so it means very little.  However, when someone who abhors swearing uses it, I know to pay attention because it is costly for the sender to convey information in this manner.

Analytically, think of the sender as having two potential kinds of information:  crucial information or moderately important information.  Only the sender knows the type of information, and it can be communicated with or without swearing.  It doesn't pay for the sender to incur the costs of swearing to communicate moderately important information.  Rather, swearing is reserved for communicating crucial information.

Why does it cost more to insure a Tesla?

The AAA is raising rates to insure Tesla's, and Tesla is angry:

The rear-wheel-drive Tesla Model S is involved in 46 percent more claims than average, and those claims cost more than twice the average, it said.

it wasn't clear whether this was due to Adverse Selection (people who buy Tesla's are worse drivers, or more prone to file claims, and the Tesla is expensive to repair) or Moral Hazard (those who buy Tesla's drive more recklessly after they buy).

Remember Adverse selection is caused by hidden information about a person's type, moral hazard is caused hidden information about actions.

Like Growing Wheat on Wall Street

The FCC recently concluded an historical auction. Spectrum licenses have been auctioned off for mobile phone service in the past and licenses to use spectrum within a specific assignment have been exchanged in the past. But this represents one of the few times (only?) that an auction was implemented to move spectrum from one assigned use (TV Broadcast) to another (Mobile Broadband). Broadcasters have a huge chunk of spectrum (most of the light blue in lines 2, 4 & 5 in the chart) but few people still receive TV signals over-the-air. Thus, it is in a low-valued use.

At the same time, users have been demanding ever more bandwidth from broadband mobile providers. Some 145 TV broadcasters (mostly fringe or duplicative channels in large markets) volunteered to go off the air for $10 billion. The mobile broadband providers will pay $19 billion with the difference going to the US Treasury. Just imagine what sort of fancy gizmos this will make available. Just imagine how many more if the US government did not impose such a hefty tax.

The whole episode reminds me of a comment Tom Hazlett made once. "Our Spectrum allocation is less efficient than using Wall Street for wheat farming."

Hat tip: Lisa George

Why are productive people leaving Puerto Rico?

The economy is contracting and productive people can earn two to three times more on the US mainland than in Puerto Rico.

“I had to choose for my family,’’ said Aledie Amariah Navas Nazario, 39, a pediatric pulmonologist who left behind young asthma patients when she, her husband and two small daughters moved to Orlando, Florida.

Puerto Rico should serve as a canary in the coal mine for US states and municipalities with unsustainable levels of spending, pensions, and debt.  

Taxes and income, facts on inequality

Wall St Journal short video.