Ch10: Consumer Choice and Behavioral Economics – HubbardOBrienEconomics.com Blog

Mark Zuckerberg … All Alone in the Metaverse?

In October 2021, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg did something unusual–he changed the name of the company from Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms, Inc. According to Zuckerberg, he did so because he said, “Over time I hope our company will be seen as a metaverse company.” What is the metaverse? Definitions differ, but it typically refers to software programs that allow people to access either augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) images and information.

In both AR and VR, people wear headsets, goggles, or glasses to see images and information displayed. In VR, you wear goggles and have to remain stationary because your whole field of vision is a digital projection, so if you walk around you run the risk of tripping over furniture or other obstacles. With AR, you can walk through the physical world because your goggles display only limited amounts of information.

For example, Peggy Johnson, CEO of Magic Leap describes the device her firm sells this way: “You wear it over your eyes. You can actually think of it as a computer on your eyes. And you still see your physical world around you, but we place digital content very smartly in that physical world.” Among other uses, Magic Leap’s device can help to train a worker to use a new piece of equipment by overlaying a virtual version of the equipment over the actual piece of equipment. The virtual version would place instructions in the worker’s field of view. That worker would be in the metaverse.

While Meta has been selling Oculus AR headsets, Zuckerberg has focused more on VR than on AR. An article in the Wall Street Journal described the VR metaverse that Zuckerberg is hoping to help build: “Eventually, the idea is that people will be able to do almost anything in the metaverse: go shopping, attend school, participate in work meetings.” They would do these things while sitting at their desk or armchair. Meta’s first significant VR product was Horizon Worlds. On Horizon, after choosing an avatar, or virtual figure that represents you, you can shop, play games, or hang out with other people. You enter Horizon by using Meta’s Quest VR headset, which has a price of $400 to $700, depending on the headset’s configuration. Meta set a goal of having 500,000 monthly users of Horizon by the end of 2022 but ended the year with only around 200,000 active users.

Horizon’s main problem seems to have been that the app was subject to large network externalities. As we discuss in Chapter 10, Section 10.3 of Economics and Microeconomics, network externalities describe the situation in which the usefulness of a product increases with the number of consumers who use it. The Horizon app is enjoyable to use only if many other people are using it. But because few people regularly use the app, many new users don’t find it enjoyable and soon stop using it. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, in late 2022, “Most visitors to Horizon generally don’t return to the app after the first month … there are rarely any girls in the Hot Girl Summer Rooftop Pool Party, and in Murder Village there is often no one to kill. Even the company’s showcase worlds… are mostly barren of users.” Reality Labs, the division of Meta in charge of Horizon, the Quest headset, and other metaverse projects, had total losses of $27 billion by the end of 2022. The losses were partly the result of Meta selling Quest headsets for a price below the cost of producing them in an attempt to get more people to use Horizon.

Zuckerberg peisists in believing that the firm’s future lies with the metaverse and continues to spend billions on metaverse projects. Investors aren’t convinced that this strategy will work because, as an article on economist.com put it in early 2023: “Few people are burning to migrate to the metaverse.” As investors’ became more skeptical of Zuckerberg’s strategy, Meta’s stock price declined by more than half between the fall of 2021 and early 2023. To be successful in its metaverse strategy, Meta will eventually have to attract enough buyers of its Quest headsets and users of its Horizon app to begin taking advantage of network externalities.

Source: Dylan Croll, “Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson on the AR revolution,” news.yahoo. com, January 4, 2023; “Things Are Looking Up for Meta,” economist.com, February 3, 2023; “How Much Trouble Is Mark Zuckerberg In?” economist.com, October 16, 2022; Jeff Horwitz, Salvador Rodriguez, and Meghan Bobrowsky, “Company Documents Show Meta’s Flagship Metaverse Falling Short,” Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2022; Sarah E. Needleman, “Facebook Changes Company Name to Meta in Focus on Metaverse,” Wall Street Journal, October 28, 2021; Meghan Bobrowsky and Sarah E. Needleman, “What is the Metaverse? The Future Vision for the Internet,” Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2022.

What Caused the Plunge in Sales at Bed Bath & Beyond?

In the Apply the Concept “Trying to Use the Apple Approach to Save J.C. Penney” in Chapter 10, Section 10.4 in both Microeconomics and Economics, we discussed how Ron Johnson had been successful as head of Apple’s retail stores but failed when he was hired as CEO of J. C. Penney. Insights from behavioral economics indicate that Johnson made a mistake in eliminating Penney’s previous strategy of keeping prices high but running frequent sales. Although Penney’s “every day prices” under Johnson were lower than they had been under the previous management, many consumers failed to recognize that fact and began shopping elsewhere.

Johnson’s experience may indicate the dangers of changing a firm’s long-standing business model. Customers at brick-and-mortar retail stores fall into several categories: Some people shop in a number of stores, depending on which store has the lowest price on the particular product they’re looking for; some shop only for products such as televisions or appliances that they hesitate to buy from Amazon or other online sites; while others shop primarily in the store that typically meets their needs with respect to location, selection of products, and pricing. It’s the last category of customer that was most likely to stop shopping at Penney because of Johnson’s new pricing policy because they were accustomed to primarily buying products that were on sale.

Bed Bath & Beyond was founded in 1971 by Warren Eisenberg and Leonard Feinstein. As the name indicates, it has focused on selling household goods—sometimes called “home goods”—such as small appliances, towels, and sheets. It was perhaps best known for mailing massive numbers of 20 percent off coupons, printed on thin blue cardboard and nicknamed Big Blue, to households nationwide. Although by 2019, the firm was operating more than 1,500 stores in the United States, some investors were concerned that Bed Bath & Beyond could be run more profitably. In March 2019, the firm’s board of directors replaced the current CEO with Mark Tritton who had helped make Target stores very profitable.

In an approach similar to the one Ron Johnson had used at J.C. Penney, Tritton cut back on the number of coupons sent out, reorganized the stores to reduce the number of different products available for sale, and replaced some name brand goods with so-called private-label brands produced by Bed Bath & Beyond. Unfortunately, Tritton’s strategy was a failure and the firm, which had been profitable in 2018, suffered losses each year between 2019 and 2022. The losses totaled almost $1.5 billion. In June 2022, the firm’s board of directors replaced Tritton with Sue Grove who had been serving on the board.

Why did Tritton’s strategy fail? Partly because in March 2020, the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic forced the closure of many Bed Bath & Beyond stores. Unlike some other chains, Bed Bath & Beyond’s web site struggled to fulfill online orders. The firm also never developed a system that would have made it easy for customers to order goods online and pick them up at the curb of their retail stores. That approach helped many competitors maintain sales during the pandemic. Covid-19 also disrupted the supply chains that Tritton was depending on to produce the private-label brands he was hoping to sell in large quantities.

But the larger problems with Tritton’s strategy would likely have hurt Bed Bath & Beyond even if there had been no pandemic. Tritton thought the stores were too cluttered, particularly in comparison with Target stores, so he reduced the number of products for sale. It turned out, though, that many of Bed Bath & Beyond’s most loyal customers liked searching through the piles of goods on the shelves. One customer was quoted as saying, “I used to find so many things that I didn’t need, that I’d end up buying anyway, like July 4th-themed corn holders.” Customers who preferred to shop in less cluttered stores were likely to already be shopping elsewhere. And it turned out that many Bed Bath & Beyond customers preferred national brands and switched to shopping elsewhere when Tritton replaced those brands with private-label brands. Finally, many customers were accustomed to shopping at Bed Bath & Beyond shortly after receiving a Big Blue 20 percent off coupon. Sending out fewer coupons meant fewer trips to Bed Bath & Beyond by those customers.

In a manner similar to what happened to Johnson in his overhaul of the Penney department stores, Tritton’s changes to Bed Bath & Beyond’s business model caused many existing customer to shop elsewhere while attracting relatively few new customers. An article in the Wall Street Journal quoted an industry analyst as concluding: “Mark Tritton entered the business and ripped up its playbook. But the strategy he replaced it with was not tested and nowhere near sharp enough to compensate for the loss of traditional customers.”

Sources: Jeanette Neumann, “Bed Bath & Beyond Traced an Erratic Path to Its Current Crisis,” bloomberg.com, September 29, 2022; Kelly Tyko, “What to expect at Bed Bath & Beyond closing store sales,” axios.com September 22, 2022; Inti Pacheco and Jodi Xu Klein, “Bed Bath & Beyond to Close 150 Stores, Cut Staff, Sell Shares to Raise Cash,” Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2022; Suzanne Kapner and Dean Seal, “Bed Bath & Beyond CEO Mark Tritton Exits as Sales Plunge,” Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2022; Suzanne Kapner, “Bed Bath & Beyond Followed a Winning Playbook—and Lost,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2022; and Ron Lieber, “An Oral History of the World’s Biggest Coupon,” New York Times, November 3, 2021.

Solved Problem: Evaluating the Disney World Pricing Strategy

Supports: Microeconomics, Chapter 6, Section 6.3 and Chapter 10, Section 10.3, Economics Chapter 6, Section 6.3 and Chapter 10, Section 10.3, and Essentials of Economics, Chapter 7, Section 7.4 and Section 7.7.

In August 2022, an article in the Wall Street Journal discussed the Disney Company increasing the prices it charges for admission to its Disneyland and Walt Disney World theme parks. As a result of the price increases, “For the quarter that ended July 2 [2022], the business unit that includes the theme parks … posted record revenue of $5.42 billion and record operating income of $1.65 billion.” The increase in revenue occurred even though “attendance at Disney’s U.S. parks fell by 17% compared with the previous year….”

The article also contains the following observations about Disney’s ticket price increases:

“Disney’s theme-park pricing is determined by ‘pure supply and demand,’ said a company spokeswoman.”
“[T]he changes driving the increases in revenue and profit have drawn the ire of what Disney calls ‘legacy fans,’ or longtime parks loyalists.”

Briefly explain what must be true of the demand for tickets to Disney’s theme parks if its revenue from ticket sales increased even though 17 percent fewer tickets were sold. [For the sake of simplicity, ignore any other sources of revenue Disney earns from its theme parks apart from ticket sales.]
In Chapter 10, Section 10.3 the textbook discusses social influences on decision making, in particular, the business implications of fairness. Briefly discuss whether the analysis in that section is relevant as Disney determines the prices for tickets to its theme parks.

Solving the Problem

Step 1: Review the chapter material. This problem is about the effects of price increases on firms’ revenues and on whether firms should pay attention the possibility that consumers might be concerned about fairness when making their consumption decisions, so you may want to review Chapter 6, Section 6.3, “The Relationship between Price Elasticity of Demand and Total Revenue” and Chapter 10, Section 10.3, “Social Influences on Decision Making,” particularly the topic “Business Implications of Fairness.”

Step 2: Answer part a. by explaining what must be true of the demand for tickets to Disney’s theme parks if revenue from ticket sales increased even though Disney sold fewer tickets. Assuming that the demand curve for tickets to Disney’s theme parks is unchanged, a decline in the quantity of tickets sold will result in a move up along the demand curve for tickets, raising the price of tickets. Only if the demand curve for theme park tickets is price inelastic will the revenue Disney receives from ticket sales increase when the price of tickets increases. Revenue increases in this situation because with an inelastic demand curve, the percentage increase in price is greater than the percentage decrease in quantity demanded.

Step 3: Answer part b. by explaining whether the textbook’s discussion of the business implications of fairness is relevant as Disney as determines ticket prices. Section 10.3 may be relevant to Disney’s decisions because the section discusses that firms sometimes take consumer perceptions of fairness into account when deciding what prices to charge. Note that ordinarily economists assume that the utility consumers receive from a good or service depends only on the attributes of the good or service and is not affected by the price of the good or service. Of course, in making decisions on which goods and services to buy with their available income, consumers take price into account. But consumers take price into account by comparing the marginal utilities of products realtive to their prices, with the marginal utilities assumed not to be affected by the prices.

In other words, a consumer considering buying a ticket to Disney World will compare the marginal utility of visiting Disney World relative to the price of the ticket to the marginal utility of other goods and services relative to their prices. The consumer’s marginal utility from spending a day in Disney World will not be affected by whether he or she considers the price of the ticket to be unfairly high.

The textbook gives examples, though, of cases where a business may fail to charge the price that would maximize short-run profit because the business believes consumers would see the price as unfair, which might cause them to be unwilling to buy the product in the future. For instance, restaurants frequently don’t increase their prices during a particularly busy night, even though doing so would increase the profit they earn on that night. They are afraid that if they do so, some customers will consider the restaurants to have acted unfairly and will stop eating in the restaurants. Similarly, the National Football League doesn’t charge a price that would cause the quantity of Super Bowl tickets demanded to be equal to the fixed supply of seats available at the game because it believes that football fans would consider it unfair to do so.

The Wall Street Journal article quotes a Disney spokeswomen as saying that the company sets the price of tickets according to demand and supply. That statement seems to indicate that Disney is charging the price that will maximize the short-run profit the company earns from selling theme park tickets. But the article also indicates that many of Disney’s long-time ticket buyers are apparently upset at the higher prices Disney has been charging. If these buyers consider Disney’s prices to be unfair, they may in the future stop buying tickets.

In other words, it’s possible that Disney might find itself in a situation in which it has increased its profit in the short run at the expense of its profit in the long run. The managers at Disney might consider sacrificing some profit in the long run to increase profit in the short run an acceptable trade-off, particularly because it’s difficult for the company to know whether in fact many of its customers will in the future stop buying admission tickets because they believe current ticket prices to be unfairly high.

Sources: Robbie Whelan and Jacob Passy, “Disney’s New Pricing Magic: More Profit From Fewer Park Visitors,” Wall Street Journal, August 27, 2022.

The Economics of Sneaker Reselling

Buying athletic shoes and reselling them for a higher price has become a popular way for some people to make money. The mostly young entrepreneurs involved in this business are often called sneakerheads. Note that economists call buying a product at a low price and reselling it at a high price arbitrage. The profits received from engaging in arbitrage are called arbitrage profits. One estimate puts the total value of sneakers being resold at $2 billion per year.

Why would anybody buy sneakers from a sneakerhead that they could buy at a lower price online or from a retail store? Most people wouldn’t, which is why most sneakerheads resell only shoes that shoe manufacturers like Nike or Adidas produce in limited quantities—typically fewer than 50,000 pairs. To obtain the shoes, shoe resellers use two main strategies: (1) waiting in line at retail stores on the day that a new limited quantity shoe will be introduced, or (2) buying shoes online using a software application called a bot. A bot speeds up a buyer’s checkout process for an online sale. Typical customers buying at an online shoe site take a few minutes to choose a size, fill in their addresses, and provide their credit card information. But a few minutes is enough time for shoe resellers using bots to buy all of the newly-released shoes available on the site.

In addition to reselling shoes on their own sites, many sneakerheads use dedicated resale sites like StockX and GOAT. These sites have greatly increased the liquidity of sneakers, or the ease with which sneakers can be resold. In effect, limited-edition sneakers have become an asset like stocks, bonds, or gold because they can be bought and sold in the secondary market that exists on the online resale sites. (We discuss the concepts of primary and secondary markets for assets in Macroeconomics, Chapter 6, Section 6.2 and in Microeconomics and Economics, Chapter 8, Section 8.2.)

An article in the New York Times gives an example of the problems that bots can cause for retail shoe stores. Bodega, a shoe store in Boston, offered the limited-edition New Balance 997S sneaker on its online site. Ten minutes later, the shoe was sold out. One of the store’s owner was quoted as saying: “We got destroyed by bots. It was making it impossible for our average customers to even have a shot at the shoes.” Although the store had a policy of allowing customers to buy a maximum of three pairs of shoes, shoe resellers were able to get around the policy by having shoes shipped to their friends’ addresses or by having a group of people coordinate their purchases. An article on bloomberg.com described how one reseller along with 15 of his friends used bots to buy 600 pairs of Adidas’s Yeezy sneakers from an online site on the morning the sneakers were released. Adidas has a rule that each customer can buy only one pair of its limited-edition shoes, but the company has trouble enforcing the rule.

Shopify and other firms have developed software that retailers can use to make it difficult for resellers to use bots on the retailers’ sites. But the developers of bot software have often been able to modify the bots to get around the defenses used by the anti-bot software.

In contrast with owners of retail stores, Nike, Adidas, New Balance, and the other shoe manufacturers have a more mixed reaction to sneakerheads using bots scooping up most pairs of limited-edition shoes shortly after the shoes are released. Like the owners of retail stores, the shoe manufacturers know that they risk upsetting the typical customer if the customer can only buy hot new shoe releases from resellers at prices well above the original retail price. But an active resale market increases the demand for shoes, just as individual investors increased their demand for individual stocks when it became possible to easily buy and sell stocks online using sites like TD Ameritrade, E*Trade, and Fidelity. So manufacturers benefit from knowing that most of their limited-edition shoes will sell out. One industry analyst singled out “The durability of Nike’s … ability to fuel the sneaker resale ecosystem ….” as a particular strength of the company. In addition, manufacturers may believe that the publicity about limited edition shoes rapidly selling out may spill over to increased demand for other shoes the manufacturers sell. (In Microeconomics and Economics, Chapter 10, Section 10.3 we note that some consumers may receive utility from buying goods that are widely seen as popular and fashionable.)

In the long run, is it possible for sneakerheads to make a profit reselling shoes? It seems unlikely for the reasons we discuss in Microeconomics and Economics, Chapter 12, Section 12.5. The barriers to entry in reselling sneakers are very low. Anyone can list shoes for sale on StockX or one of the other resale sites. Waiting in line in front of a retail store on the day a new shoe is released is something that anyone who is willing to accept the opportunity cost of the time lost can do. Similarly, bots that can be used to scoop up newly released shoes from online sites are widely available for sale. So, we would expect that in the long run entry into sneaker reselling will compete away any economic profit that sneakerheads were earning.

In fact, by the summer of 2022, prices on reselling sites were falling. In just the month of June, the average price of sneakers listed on StockX declined by 20 percent. Resellers who had stockpiled shoes waiting for prices to increase were instead selling them because they feared that prices would go even lower. And new limited-edition shoes were taking longer to sell out. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, “A pair of Air Jordans released on July 13 [2022] that might have once vanished in minutes took days to sell out from Nike Inc.’s virtual shelves.” One reseller quoted in the Wall Street Journal article indicated that entry was the reason that prices were falling: “You don’t want prices to go down, but they’re going down anyways, just because of how many people are selling in general.”

Although a seemingly unusual market, sneaker reselling is subject to the same rules of competition that we see in other markets.

Sources: Inti Pacheco, “Flipping Air Jordans Is No Longer a Slam Dunk,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2022; Shoshy Ciment, “Sneaker Reselling Side Hustle: Your Guide to Making Thousands Flipping Hyped Pairs of Dunks, Jordans, and Yeezys,” businessinsider.com, May 3, 2022; Teresa Rivas, “A Strong Sneaker-Resale Market Is Another Boon for Nike,” barrons.com, May 24, 2022; Curtis Bunn, “Sneakers Are So Hot, Resellers Are Making a Living Off of Coveted Models,” nbcnews.com, October 23, 2021; Daisuke Wakabayashi, “The Fight for Sneakers,” New York Times, October 15, 2021; and Joshua Hunt, “Sneakerheads Have Turned Jordans and Yeezys Into a Bona Fide Asset Class,” bloomberg.com, February 15, 2021.

Is Vladimir Putin Acting Rationally?

Photo of Russian President Vladimir Putin from the *Wall Street Journal*.

On February 24, when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an assault on Ukraine he apparently expected within a few days to achieve his main objectives, including occupying the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and replacing the Ukrainian government. After three weeks, the fierce resistance of the Ukrainian armed forces have resulted in his failing to achieve these objectives. Although the Russian military had expected to experience few casualties or losses of equipment, in fact Russia has already lost more military personnel killed than the United States has since 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq combined, as well as experiencing the destruction of many tanks, planes, and other equipment.

The United States, the European Union, and other countries have imposed economic sanctions on Russia that have reduced the country’s ability to import or export most goods, other than oil and natural gas. The sanctions have the potential to reduce the standard of living of the average Russian citizen.

Most importantly, the war has killed thousands of Ukrainians and inflicted horrendous damage on many Ukrainian cities.

Despite all this, is Putin’s persistence in the invasion rational or if he were acting rationally would he instead withdraw his troops or accept a political comprise (at this writing, negotiations between representatives of Russia and Ukraine are continuing)? First, recall the economic definition of rationality: People are rational when they take actions that are appropriate to achieve their goals given the information available to them. (We discuss rationality in Microeconomics, Chapter 10, Section 10.4, and in Economics, Chapter 10, Section 10.4.) Note that rationality does not deal with whether a person’s goals are good or bad. In this discussion, we are considering whether Putin is acting rationally in attempting to achieve the—immoral—goal of subjugating a foreign country.

Peter Coy, a columnist for the New York Times, discusses three reasons Putin may continue his attack on Ukraine even though, “The bloody invasion of Ukraine has been a disaster” for Putin. The first reason, Coy recognizes, involves an economic concept. His other two reasons can also be understood within the economic framework we employ in Microeconomics.

First, Coy argues that Putin may have fallen into one of the pitfalls to decision making we discuss in Chapter 10: A failure to ignore sunk costs. Coy notes that Putin may want to continue the attack to justify the death and destruction that has already occurred. However, those costs are sunk because no subsequent action Putin takes can reduce them. If Putin is continuing the attack for this reason, then Coy is correct that Putin is not acting rationally because he is failing to ignore sunk costs in making his decision.

There is a subtle point, though, that Coy may be overlooking: Putin is effectively a dictator, but he may still believe he needs to avoid Russian public opinion turning too sharply against him. In that case, even if recognizes that he should ignore sunk costs he may believe that the Russian public may not be willing to ignore the costs of the death and destruction that has already occurred. In that case, his refusal to ignore this sunk cost be rational.

Coy’s second reason why Putin may continue the attack is that he may believe “just another few weeks of fighting will be enough to subdue Ukraine.” Although Coy doesn’t discuss the point in these terms, it would be rational for Putin to continue the attack if he believes that the marginal benefit of doing so exceeds the marginal cost. (We discuss this point directly in Chapter 1, Section 1.1 “Optimal Decisions Are Made at the Margin,” and provided many examples throughout the text.) The marginal cost includes the additional Russian military casualties and losses of equipment from prolonging the war and the cost of economic sanctions to the Russian economy. (It seems unlikely that Putin is taking into account the additional loss of life among Ukrainians and the additional devastation to Ukrainian cities from prolonging the war.)

The marginal benefit from continuing the attack would be either winning the war or obtaining a more favorable peace settlement in negotiations with the Ukrainian government. If Putin believes that the marginal benefit is greater than the marginal cost, he is acting rationally in continuing to attack.

Coy’s final reason why Putin may continue the attack is that “he has little to lose by fighting on.” Although Coy doesn’t discuss the point in these terms, Russia may be suffering from a principal-agent problem. As we discuss in Microeconomics, Chapter 8, Section 8.1 (also Economics, Chapter 8, Section 8.1 and Macroeconomics, Chapter 6, Section 6.1) the principal-agent problem arises when an agent pursues the agent’s interst rather than the interests of the principal in whose behalf the agent is supposed to act. In this case, Putin is the agent and the Russian people are the principal. Putin’s own interest may be in prolonging the war indefinitely in the hopes of ultimately winning, despite the additional Russian soldiers who will be wounded or killed and despite the economic suffering of the Russian people resulting from the sanctions.

Although as president of Russia, Putin should be acting in the best interests of the Russian people, as a dictator, he can largely disregard their interests. Unlike his soldiers, Putin isn’t exposed to the personal dangers of being in battle. And unlike the average Russian, Putin will not suffer a decline in his standard of living because of economic sanctions.

Appalling as the consequences will be, Putin’s continuing his attack on Ukraine may be rational.

Sources: Peter Coy, “Here Are Three Reasons Putin Might Fight On,” New York Times, March 14, 2022; Alan Cullison, “Talks to End Ukraine War Pause as Russia’s Offensive Intensifies,” Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2022; and Thomas Grove, “Russia’s Military Chief Promised Quick Victory in Ukraine, but Now Faces a Potential Quagmire,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2022.

Inflation, Supply Chain Disruptions, and the Peculiar Process of Purchasing a Car

Inflation as measured by the percentage change in the consumer price index (CPI) from the same month in the previous year was 7.9 percent in February 2022, the highest rate since January 1982—near the end of the Great Inflation that began in the late 1960s. The following figure shows inflation in the new motor vehicle component of the CPI. The 12.4 percent increase in new car prices was the largest since April 1975.

The increase in new car prices was being driven partly by increases in aggregate demand resulting from the highly expansionary monetary and fiscal policies enacted in response to the economic disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and partly from shortages of semiconductors and some other car components, which reduced the supply of new cars.

As the following figure shows, inflation in used car prices was even greater. With the exception of June and July of 2021, the 41.2 percent increase in used car prices in February 2022 was the largest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began publishing these data in 1954.

Because used cars are a substitute of new cars, rising prices of new cars caused an increase in demand for used cars. In addition, the supply of used cars was reduced because car rental firms, such as Enterprise and Hertz, had purchased fewer new cars during the worst of the pandemic and so had fewer used cars to sell to used car dealers. Increased demand and reduced supply resulted in the sharp increase in the price of used cars.

Another factor increasing the prices consumers were paying for cars was a reduction in bargaining—or haggling—over car prices. Traditionally, most goods and services are sold at a fixed price. For example, some buying a refrigerator usually pays the posted price charged by Best Buy, Lowes, or another retailer. But houses and cars have been an exception, with buyers often negotiating prices that are lower than the seller was asking.

In the case of automobiles, by federal law, the price of a new car has to be posted on the car’s window. The posted price is called the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP), often referred to as the sticker price. Typically, the sticker price represents a ceiling on what a consumer is likely to pay, with many—but not all—buyers negotiating for a lower price. Some people dislike the idea of bargaining over the price of a car, particularly if they get drawn into long negotiations at a car dealership. These buyers are likely to pay the sticker price or something very close to it.

As a result, car dealers have an opportunity to practice price discrimination: They charge buyers whose demand for cars is more price elastic lower prices and buyers whose demand is less price elastic higher prices. The car dealers are able to separate the two groups on the basis of the buyers willingness to haggle over the price of a car. (We discuss price discrimination in Microeconomics and Economics, Chapter 15, Section 15.5.) Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the ability of car dealers to practice this form of price discrimination had been eroded by the availability of online car buying services, such as Consumer Reports’ “Build & Buy Service,” which allow buyers to compare competing price offers from local car dealers. There aren’t sufficient data to determine whether using an online buying service results in prices as low as those obtained by buyers willing to haggle over price face-to-face with salespeople in dealerships.

In any event, in 2022 most car buyers were faced with a different situation: Rather than serving as a ceiling on the price, the MSRP, had become a floor. That is, many buyers found that given the reduced supply of new cars, they had to pay more than the MSRP. As one buyer quoted in a Wall Street Journal article put it: “The rules have changed so dramatically…. [T]he dealer’s position is ‘This is kind of a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.’” According to the website Edmunds.com, in January 2021, only about 3 percent of cars were sold in the United States for prices above MSRP, but in January 2022, 82 percent were.

Car manufacturers are opposed to dealers charging prices higher than the MSRP, fearing that doing so will damage the car’s brand. But car manufacturers don’t own the dealerships that sell their cars. The dealerships are independently owned businesses, a situation that dates back to the beginning of the car industry in the early 1900s. Early automobile manufacturers, such as Henry Ford, couldn’t raise sufficient funds to buy and operate a nationwide network of car dealerships. The manufacturers often even had trouble financing the working capital—or the funds used to finance the daily operations of the firm—to buy components from suppliers, pay workers, and cover the other costs of manufacturing automobiles.

The manufacturers solved both problems by relying on a network of independent dealerships that would be given franchises to be the exclusive sellers of a manufacturer’s brand of cars in a given area. The local businesspeople who owned the dealerships raised funds locally, often from commercial banks. Manufacturers generally paid their suppliers 30 to 90 days after receiving shipments of components, while requiring their dealers to pay a deposit on the cars they ordered and to pay the balance due at the time the cars were delivered to the dealers. One historian of the automobile industry described the process:

The great demand for automobiles and the large profits available for [dealers], in the early days of the industry … enabled the producers to exact substantial advance deposits of cash for all orders and to require cash payment upon delivery of the vehicles …. The suppliers of parts and materials, on the other hand, extended book-account credit of thirty to ninety days. Thus the automobile producer had a month or more in which to assemble and sell his vehicles before the bills from suppliers became due; and much of his labor costs could be paid from dealers’ deposits.

The franchise system had some drawbacks for car manufacturers, however. A car dealership benefits from the reputation of the manufacturer whose cars it sells, but it has an incentive to free ride on that reputation. That is, if a local dealer can take an action—such as selling cars above the MSRP—that raises its profit, it has an incentive to do so even if the action damages the reputation of Ford, General Motors, or whichever firm’s cars the dealer is selling. Car manufacturers have long been aware of the problem of car dealers free riding on the manufacturer’s reputation. For instance, in the 1920s, Ford sent so-called road men to inspect Ford dealers to check that they had clean, well-lighted showrooms and competent repair shops in order to make sure the dealerships weren’t damaging Ford’s brand.

As we discuss in Microeconomics and Economics, Chapter 10, Section 10.3, consumers often believe it’s unfair of a firm to raise prices—such as a hardware store raising the prices of shovels after a snowstorm—when the increases aren’t the result of increases in the firm’s costs. Knowing that many consumers have this view, car manufacturers in 2022 wanted their dealers not to sell cars for prices above the MSRP. As an article in the Wall Street Journal put it: “Historically, car companies have said they disapprove of their dealers charging above MSRP, saying it can reflect poorly on the brand and alienate customers.”

But the car manufacturers ran into another consequence of the franchise system. Using a franchise system rather than selling cars through manufacturer owned dealerships means that there are thousands of independent car dealers in the United States. The number of dealers makes them an effective lobbying force with state governments. As a result, most states have passed state franchise laws that limit the ability of car manufacturers to control the actions of their dealers and sometimes prohibit car manufacturers from selling cars directly to consumers. Although Tesla has attained the right in some states to sell directly to consumers without using franchised dealers, Ford, General Motors, and other manufacturers still rely exclusively on dealers. The result is that car manufacturers can’t legally set the prices that their dealerships charge.

Will the situation of most people paying the sticker price—or more—for cars persist after the current supply chain problems are resolved? AutoNation is the largest chain of car dealerships in the United States. Recently, Mike Manley, the firm’s CEO, argued that the substantial discounts from the sticker price that were common before the pandemic are a thing of the past. He argued that car manufacturers were likely to keep production of new cars more closely in balance with consumer demand, reducing the number of cars dealers keep in inventory on their lots: “We will not return to excessively high inventory levels that depress new-vehicle margins.”

Only time will tell whether the situation facing car buyers in 2022 of having to pay prices above the MSRP will persist.

Sources: Mike Colias and Nora Eckert, “A New Brand of Sticker Shock Hits the Car Market,” Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2022; Nora Eckert and Mike Colias, “Ford and GM Warn Dealers to Stop Charging So Much for New Cars,” Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2022; Gabrielle Coppola, “Car Discounts Aren’t Coming Back After Pandemic, AutoNation Says,” bloomberg.com, February 9, 2022; cr.org/buildandbuy; Lawrence H. Seltzer, A Financial History of the American Automobile Industry, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1928; and Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Are Economic Profits a Sign of Market Power?

Cecilia Rouse, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Photo from the *Washington Post*.

An article in the Washington Post discussed a debate among President Biden’s economic advisers. The debate was over “over whether the White House should blame corporate consolidation and monopoly power for price hikes.” Some members of the National Economic Council supported the view that the increase in inflation that began in the spring of 2021 was the result of a decline in competition in the U.S. economy.

Some Democratic members of Congress have also supported this view. For instance, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren argued on Twitter that: “One clear explanation for higher inflation? Giant corporations are exploiting their market power to further raise prices. And corporate executives are bragging about their higher profits.” Or, as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders put it: “The problem is not inflation. The problem is corporate greed, collusion & profiteering.”

But according to the article, Cecilia Rouse, chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), and other members of the CEA are skeptical that a lack of competition are the main reason for the increase in inflation, arguing that very expansionary monetary and fiscal policies, along with disruptions to supply chains, have been more important.

In an earlier blog post (found here), we noted that a large majority of more than 40 well-known academic economists surveyed by the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago disagreed with the statement: “A significant factor behind today’s higher US inflation is dominant corporations in uncompetitive markets taking advantage of their market power to raise prices in order to increase their profit margins.”

One difficulty with the argument that the sharp increase in inflation since mid-2021 was due to corporate greed is that there is no particular reason to believe that corporations suddenly became more greedy than they had been when inflation was much lower. If inflation were mainly due to corporate greed, then greed must fluctuate over time, just as inflation does. Economic writer and blogger Noah Smith poked fun at this idea in the following graph.

It’s worth noting that “greed” is one way of characterizing the self-interested behavior that underlies the assumption that firms maximize profits and individual maximize utility. (We discuss profit maximization in Microeconomics, Chapter 12, Section 12.2, and utility maximization in Chapter 10, Section 10.1.) When economists discuss self-interested behavior, they are not making a normative statement that it’s good for people to be self-interested. Instead, they are making a positive statement that economic models that assume that businesses maximize profit and consumers maximize utility have been successful in analyzing and predicting the behavior of businesses and households.

Corporate profits increased from $1.95 trillion in the first quarter of 2021 to $2.40 trillion in third quarter of 2021 (the most recent quarter for which data are available). Using another measure of profit, during the same period, corporate profits increased from about 16 percent of value added by nonfinancial corporate businesses to about 18 percent. (Value added measures the market value a firm adds to a product. We discuss calculating value added in Macroeconomics, Chapter 8, Section 8.1.)

There have been mergers in some industries that may have contributed to an increase in profits—the Biden Administration has singled out mergers in the meatpacking industry as having led to higher beef and chicken prices. At this point, though, it’s not possible to gauge the extent to which mergers have been responsible for higher prices, even in the meatpacking industry.

An increase in profit is not by itself an indication that firms have increased their market power. We would expect that even in a perfectly competitive industry, an increase in demand will lead in the short run to an increase in the economic profit earned by firms in the industry. But in the long run we expect economic profit to be competed away either by existing firms expanding their production or by new firms entering the industry.

In Chapter 12, we use Figure 12.8 to illustrate the effects of entry in the market for cage-free eggs. Panel (a) shows the market for cage-free eggs, made up of all the egg sellers and egg buyers. Panel (b) shows the situation facing one farmer producing cage-free eggs. (Note the very different scales of the horizontal axes in the two panels.) At $3 per dozen eggs, the typical egg farmer is earning an economic profit, shown by the green rectangle in panel (b). That economic profit attracts new entrants to the market—perhaps, in this case, egg farmers who convert to using cage-free methods. The result of entry is a movement down the demand curve to a new equilibrium price of $2 per dozen. At that price, the typical egg farmer is no longer earning an economic profit.

A few last observations:

The recent increase in profits may also be short-lived if it reflects a temporary increase in demand for some durable goods, such as furniture and appliances, raising their prices and increasing the profits of firms that produce them. The increase in spending on goods, and reduced spending on services, appears to have resulted from: (1) Households having additional funds to spend as a result of the payments they received from fiscal policy actions in 2020 and early 2021, and (2) a reluctance of households to spend on some services, such as restaurant meals and movie theater tickets, due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The increase in profits in some industries may also be due to a reduction in supply in those industries having forced up prices. For instance, a shortage of semiconductors has reduced the supply of automobiles, raising car prices and the profits of automobile manufacturers. Over time, supply in these industries should increase, bringing down both prices and profits.
If some changes in consumer demand persist over time, we would expect that the economic profits firms are earning in the affected industries will attract the entry of new firms—a process we illustrated above. In early 2022, this process is far from complete because it takes time for new firms to enter an industry.

Source: Jeff Stein, “White House economists push back against pressure to blame corporations for inflation,” Washington Post, February 17, 2022; Mike Dorning, “Biden Launches Plan to Fight Meatpacker Giants on Inflation,” bloomberg.com, January 3, 2022; and U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.ec

Can People be “Nudged” into Getting Vaccinated?

In Economics, Chapter 10, Section 10.4, when discussing behavioral economics, we mentioned Richard Thaler’s idea of nudges, which are small changes that government policymakers or business managers can make that may affect people’s behavior. Underlying the concept of nudges is the assumption that at least some of the time people may not be making fully rational decisions (We discuss in the chapter the reasons why people may not always make fully rational decisions.) An example of a nudge is a business automatically enrolling employees into retirement savings plans to overcome the tendency of many people to be unrealistic about their future behavior.

Once vaccines for the Covid-19 virus became widely available to the general adult population in 2021, some government policymakers were concerned that not enough people were being vaccinated to quickly curb the pandemic. Some people who declined to be vaccinated had carefully thought through the decision and declined the vaccine either because they believed they were at only a small risk of developing a severe case of Covid-19 or for other reasons. But some people who were not vaccinated intended eventually to receive the injection but for various reasons had not yet done so. The second group were potentially candidates for being nudged into becoming vaccinated.

A recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Tom Chang of the University of Southern California and colleagues reports an experiment that measured the effect of nudges intended to increase the likelihood of someone becoming vaccinated. The study was conducted in Contra Costa Country in northern California with 2,700 Medicaid (a state run system of health care offered to people with low incomes) recipients who agreed to participate. The study took place between May and July 2021 after all adults in the county had been eligible for several weeks to receive a vaccine. Half the people involved in the experiment received three nudges: 1) a video noting the positive effects of being vaccinated, 2) a financial incentive of either $10 or $50 if they received a vaccination within two weeks, and 3) “a highlighted convenient link to the county’s new public vaccination appointment scheduling system or just a message about getting vaccinated without a link.” The other half of the people involved in the experiment received none of these nudges.

The authors’ statistical analysis of the results of the experiment indicates that none of the nudges individually or in combination significantly raised vaccination rates. Do these results show conclusively that nudges are ineffective in increasing Covid-19 vaccination rates? The authors note that the people involved in this experiment were not representative of the U.S. population. All had low incomes (which made them eligible for Medicaid), they were relatively young, and were more likely to be Black or Hispanic than is true of the overall U.S. population. The study also took place just before the peak in the spread of the Delta variant of Covid-19 at a time when infection rates appeared to be declining. So, while for these reasons the study cannot be called a definitive, it does provide some evidence that nudges may not be effective in changing behavior towards vaccinations.

Source: Tom Chang, Mireille Jacobson, Manisha Shah, Rajiv Pramanik, and Samir B. Shah, “Financial Incentives and other Nudges Do Not Increase Covid-19 Vaccinations among the Vaccine Hesitant,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 29403, October 2021.

Guest Post from Eva Dziadula of Notre Dame on Using Behavioral Economics to Improve Test Scores

Eva is an Associate Teaching Professor at the University of Notre Dame, where she is also a fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, and the Pulte Institute for Global Development. She received her PhD from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2014.

Last June, we interviewed Eva on our podcast. That podcast can be found HERE.

Can a Behavioral Nudge with Small Commitment Lead to Better Exam Scores?

So Covid brought challenges…. we can’t really even count them. In the world of education, it meant switching to online delivery and while that may be hard on us professors, it also requires a lot more from students. Learning from home requires more discipline, there is a degree of freedom (statistics pun intended). There is also a lack of accountability that typically comes with attending an in-person class where the professor can call you out for not being prepared. This is what non-traditional students who have a job, a family, go through on a regular basis even without Covid. The often opt for online classes in the first place. It can also be a tougher adjustment for students who come from traditionally underrepresented groups in higher education, as they may not grow up watching their parents make lists, prioritize, and manage time that would promote college success. Is there something that could help alter students’ behavior and overcome this inequality?

In all of our introductory economic models, we assume that agents are rational. If that assumption is violated, we cannot really predict how they will respond to incentives and our models would lose their predictive power. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Richard Thaler for his contributions to behavioral economics. The art and science of “irrationality”. Well, about time as we seem to violate rationality a lot! We know we should study, we know we should not procrastinate, yes we know but… These choices can have serious long-term consequences, so it is important to study our behaviors and why we make decisions that perhaps do not appear rational. And it is important to study how we could alter certain behaviors. Research has shown that simply nudging students with a text message doesn’t really lead to improvements in academic performance. A 2019 NBER working paper summarized it pretty well: “The Remarkable Unresponsiveness of College Students to Nudging and What We Can Learn from It.” [The paper can be found HERE.]

In our paper “Microcommitments: The Effect of Small Commitments on Academic Performance,” we set out to test whether a text message nudge accompanied by a small commitment can “push” students in the right direction. In economics, the gold standard of answering questions like this is a randomized controlled trial. If assignment is not random and students are selected into treatment and control groups, then we would not be able to identify the role of the intervention, as these groups may be responding differently in the first place. For example, imagine we tested the nudge with commitment on a group of women and men served as the “placebo” control group. If we find higher exam scores for women, then it may be because of the nudge with commitment but it is also entirely possible that women could have scored higher regardless, this is referred to as a selection bias. We overcome this by randomly assigning almost 1,000 students from the University of Notre Dame, Florida Atlantic University, and University of Illinois into two groups, which after close examination of observable characteristics look very similar. This is called a balance test. After randomization, the two groups have a similar proportion of women, similar average SAT, GPA, age, family structure, their procrastination tendencies, self-efficacy, study habits, etc. Some of the students are enrolled in regular in-person classes, and some are enrolled in a hybrid/online classes.

After the first exam of the semester, which will serve as a baseline comparison, the experiment begins! Both groups receive text messages in the morning with content related to material covered in class. Students know they are not required to submit their answers and it is not mandatory, these messages are just extra practice on how to think as an economist. The control group received the content as a simple text message. The treatment group’s text message also had “I commit” to click. Then at 4pm, they also got a follow up text with “I did it” click. This is the commitment device we are testing and it is the only difference between the treatment and control groups, everything else is identical. The research question is: Does a small commitment (really to yourself, as it is not required) compel you to complete the task and does this engagement then improve your future exam score? The regression estimation allows us to hold everything else constant, so we are adhering to our ceteris paribus condition.

It turns out that the small commitment does make a difference! In fact, the positive results on the exam which followed the experiment is driven by students in hybrid and online classes who scored 3.5 percentage points higher than students in the control group which received the same message content but did not receive the commitment! We find no effect on the academic performance among students in regular in-person classes. It appears that this simple intervention partially substitutes for the lack of instructor contact for students in hybrid and online classes. We also find that students who tend to procrastinate and those with lower GPA benefit from the commitment device more, which then acts as an equalizing force in terms of academic performance and could have positive implications for social mobility and economic equity. Who would have thought that making a small promise to yourself could actually make a difference!!!

References: Felkey, Amanda J, Eva Dziadula, Eric P Chiang, and Jose Vazquez. 2021. “Microcommitments: The Effect of Small Commitments on Academic Performance.” AEA Papers and Proceedings 111: 1–6. [The paper can be found HERE.]

Oreopoulos, Philip, and Uros Petronijevic. 2019. “The Remarkable Unresponsiveness of College Students to Nudging and What We Can Learn from It.” [The paper can be found HERE.]

More Than You Probably Want to Know about the Debate Over Whether Giving Presents Causes a Deadweight Loss

If your sister gives you a sweater that you don’t like, the subjective value you place on the sweater will probably be less than the price your sister paid for it. As we saw in Chapter 4, Sections 4.1 and 4.2, consumer surplus is the difference between the highest price a consumer is willing to pay for a good (which equals the consumer’s marginal benefit from the good) and the actual price the consumer pays. We expect that you will only buy things that have a marginal benefit to you greater than (or, at worst, equal to) the price you paid. Therefore, everything you buy provides you with positive (or, again at worst, zero) consumer surplus. But if the price is greater than the marginal benefit—as is the case with the sweater your sister gave you—consumer surplus is negative and there is a deadweight loss.

In the early 1990s, Joel Waldfogel, currently at the University of Minnesota, published an article in the American Economic Review in which he reported surveying his undergraduate students, asking them to: (1) list every gift they had received for Christmas, (2) estimate the retail price of each gift, and (3) state how much they would have been willing to pay for each gift. Waldfogel’s students estimated that their families and friends had paid $438 on average on the students’ gifts. The students themselves, however, would have been willing to pay only $313 for the goods they received as gifts—so, on average, each student’s gifts caused a deadweight loss of $313 – $438 = –$125. If the deadweight losses experienced by Waldfogel’s students were extrapolated to the whole population, the total deadweight loss of Christmas gift giving could be as much as $23 billion (adjusting the value in Waldfogel’s article to 2020 prices).

If the gifts had been cash, the people receiving the gifts would not have been constrained by the gift givers’ choices, and there would have been no deadweight loss. If your sister had given you cash instead of that sweater you didn’t like, you could have bought whatever you wanted and received positive consumer surplus.

Waldfogel’s article attracted much more attention than is received by the typical academic journal article, being covered in newspaper articles and on television. It also set off a lively debate among economists over whether his approach was valid. Waldfogel later published a short book, Scroogenomics, in which he argued that, in fact, his journal article had underestimated the deadweight loss of gift giving because it compared the value of the gift to the person receiving it to the value of receiving cash instead. He noted that a more accurate comparison would be not to cash but to the value of the good the person receiving the gift would have bought with the cash. Because that purchase would provide positive consumer surplus to the buyer, the buyer’s loss from receiving a gift rather than cash is significantly greater than he had originally calculated.

Waldfogel again surveyed his undergraduate students asking them to make this revised comparison and found (p. 35): “Dollars on gifts for you produce 18 percent less satisfaction, per dollar, than dollars you spend on yourself.” Waldfogel also noted that a gift giver has to spend time shopping for a gift, which—unless the giver enjoys spending time shopping—should be added to the cost of gift giving.

As a number of critics of Waldfogel’s analysis have noted, if giving gifts rather than cash makes the recipient worse off and the giver no better off (or worse off if we take into account the cost of the time spent shopping) why has the tradition of giving gifts on holidays and birthdays persisted? Waldfogel argues that for a large fraction of the U.S. population, giving gifts at Christmas is a strong social custom that people are reluctant to break. He believes there is also a social custom against close friends and relatives—parents, siblings, girlfriends, boyfriends, and spouses—giving cash. (Although he believes that it’s socially acceptable for relatives—such as grandparents, aunts, and uncles—who see the gift recipient infrequently to give cash or gift cards).

Some economists have questioned Waldfogel’s results because he surveyed only college students, who are not a representative sample of the population because they are on average younger and come from higher-income families. Because Waldfogel’s students were all enrolled in an economics course, their views may have been affected by what they learned in class. Sarah Solnick, of the University of Vermont, and David Hemenway, of the Harvard University School of Public Health, argue that because most economics students know the economic result that receiving cash as a gift is likely to be preferable to receiving a good, they may have felt social pressure to value their gifts at less than the price paid for them.

To see whether Waldfogel’s including only college students in his survey mattered for his results, Solnick and Hemenway surveyed graduate students and staff at the Harvard School of Public Health as well as people randomly approached at train stations and airports in Boston and Philadelphia. On average the people Solnick and Hemenway surveyed gave their Christmas gifts a value 114 percent higher than the price they estimated the gift giver had paid. In other words, contrary to Waldfogel’s result, gift giving generated a large positive consumer surplus or a welfare gain rather than a welfare loss. The authors speculate that the positive consumer surplus in gift giving may result because the recipient “respects the tastes of the giver, or the item is something the recipient never remembers to get.” Or, perhaps, “The individual wants the item but would feel bad purchasing it for herself. She is grateful to receive it as a gift.”

Solnick and Hemenway’s analysis has also been criticized. Bradley Ruffle and Orit Tykocinski of Ben Gurion University in Israel point out that the order in which questions are asked in a survey can influence the responses. Both Waldfogel and Solnick and Hemenway asked people being surveyed to first estimate what the giver had paid for the gift before asking the value the recipient assigned to the gift. Ruffle and Tykocinski also noted that Solnick and Hemenway changed one question being asked from “the amount of cash such that you are indifferent” between receiving the gift and receiving cash (which is how Waldfogel phrased the question) to the “amount of money that would make you equally happy.” Ruffle and Tykocinski believe this change in wording may also help account for why Solnick and Hemenway’s results differed from Waldfogel’s.

Ruffle and Tykocinski carried out a survey using undergraduate psychology and economics students, varying the wording and the order of the questions. Their results indicated that the wording of the questions mattered, although the order the questions had only a slight effect, and that the psychology students and the economics students did not have significant differences in how much they valued gifts, although psychology students tended to estimate that gift givers had paid a higher price for the gifts. The authors concluded: “Is gift-giving a source of deadweight loss? Our results indicate that it depends critically on how you ask the question and, to a lesser degree, on whom you ask.”

Solnick and Hemenway responded that Ruffle and Tykocinski’s analysis was flawed because, like Waldfogel, they surveyed only undergraduate students: “Ours remains the only study to use adults, living independently, as subjects.” They note that “Ruffle and Tykocinski’s subjects performed poorly in estimating costs,” which may indicate that they lack the experience in buying a large range of goods and so have trouble comparing the value they place on a gift to the cost the giver paid.

John List, of the University of Chicago, and Jason Shogren, of the University of Wyoming, raised the issue of whether the hypothetical nature of the values the gift recipients placed on their gifts mattered. That is, whatever subjective value the recipient gave to a gift, he or she would not actually have the opportunity to sell the gift at a price equal to that value. To test the possibility the recipient’s valuation of a gift would change if the recipient had the opportunity to sell the gift, List and Shogren asked a group of undergraduates to estimate the costs of the gifts they had received for Christmas and to indicate the value they placed on the gifts (just as Waldfogel and the other economists discussed earlier had done). But List and Shogren then added another step by carrying out a so-called random nth price auction of the gifts: “For example, suppose G = 500 gifts overall and #6 was chosen as the random nth price, then only the five lowest-valuation gifts overall would be purchased at the sixth lowest offer.” This somewhat complicated auction design was intended to make it more likely that the students being surveyed would reveal the true value they placed on the gifts.

The results were similar to those found by Solnick and Hemenway in that the recipients put a higher value on the gifts than their estimates of the price the givers paid—so there was positive consumer surplus from gift giving. Their estimate of the welfare gain was significantly smaller than Solnick and Hemenway’s estimate—21 percent to 35 percent versus 114 percent.

Solnick and Hemenway were not entirely convinced by List and Shogren’s findings. They note that because the auction design made it unlikely that the students would actually have to sell their most expensive gifts, the students may have placed a subjective value on these gifts that was too low. In addition, they note that List and Shogren, like Waldfogel, included only college students in their survey.

Joel Waldfogel also replied to List and Shogren, making several of the points he was later to elaborate on in his Scroogenomics book, as discussed above: Basic economic analysis assumes that consumers choose the goods and services they buy to maximize their utility (see Chapter 10 in our textbook), therefore: “If givers, through their choice of gifts, can achieve higher recipient utility than can the recipients themselves, then a fundamental economic assumption is called into question.” List and Shogren compare the value students place on their gifts to the value of receiving cash rather than to the consumer surplus the students would receive from the goods and services they could buy with the cash. Finally, Waldfogel notes that List and Shogren’s results may be affected by what behavioral economists call the endowment effect: The tendency of people to be unwilling to sell a good they already own even if they are offered a price that is greater than the price they would be willing to pay to buy the good if they didn’t already own it. (See the discussion in Chapter 10, Section 10.4 of our textbook.) Because people will require a higher price to sell a good they already own than the price they would pay to buy it, “deadweight loss estimates based on selling prices are much smaller than deadweight loss estimates based on buying prices.”

Even though economists have carried on the debate over the deadweight loss of gift giving in technical terms involving how consumer surplus is best measured, how surveys should be designed, and how best to solicit accurate answers from survey takers, journalists have been intrigued enough by the debate to write it about for general audiences. Josh Barro, who writes for New York magazine and is the son of Harvard economist Robert Barro, wrote a column for the New York Times, “An Economist Goes Christmas Shopping,” in which he observes that the debate among economists over gift giving “makes ordinary people think economists are kind of crazy.” He writes that his father had given him a box of chocolates for Christmas and notes that because he’s on a diet, the gift was “an example of what Mr. Waldfogel warned us about: gift mismatch leading to deadweight loss.” But that he actually ate half the box of chocolates indicated that his father had “identified an item I would not have bought for myself but apparently wanted.” But “now feel I should not have eaten the chocolates, or at least not so many of them in two days.” He concludes that, “The real drag on the economy then isn’t gifts; it’s bad gifts.”

A recent article by Andrew Silver on the Wired website in the United Kingdom notes that a study by academics in India found “an average deadweight loss of about 15 per cent for non-monetary gifts” given during the Hindu festival Diwali. Silver notes that the deadweight loss to gift giving is difficult to avoid because the social custom of gift giving during holidays is very strong in many countries. He concludes, “Sometimes you’ve just got to buckle down and buy something you suspect the recipient won’t value as much as you paid for it.”

Finally, do most economists agree with Waldfogel that there is a significant deadweight loss to gift giving or do they agree with his critics who argue that holiday gift giving actually increases welfare? Although the question has never been asked in a large survey of economists, it was included in a survey of leading economists conducted by the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago as part of its Initiative on Global Markets (IGM). The IGM regularly surveys a panel of economists on important (although in this case, maybe not so important) economic issues.

A few years ago, they asked their panel whether they agreed with this statement: “Giving specific presents as holiday gifts is inefficient, because recipients could satisfy their preferences much better with cash.” Of the 42 economists who responded to the question, 25 disagreed with the statement, 7 agreed, and 10 were uncertain. Of those who commented, several mentioned a point that Waldfogel had intentionally excluded from his analysis: the sentimental or emotional value that some people attach to giving and receiving presents. For instance, Janet Currie of Princeton noted that: “Gifts serve many functions such as signaling regard and demonstrating social ties with the recipient. Cash transfers don’t do this as well.” Or as Barry Eichengreen of the University of California, Berkeley put it: “Implications of a specific gift (signal it sends, behavioral impact) may give additional utility to either the giver or receiver.” Eric Maskin of Harvard may have stated his reason for disagreeing with the statement most succinctly: “Only an economist could think like this.”

Sources: Joel Waldfogel, “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas,” American Economic Review, Vol. 83, No. 4, December 1993, pp. 328–336; Joel Waldfogel, Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009; Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway, “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas: Comment,” American Economic Review, Vol. 86, No. 5, December 1996, pp. 1299-1305; Bradley J. Ruffle and Orit Tykocinski, ““The Deadweight Loss of Christmas: Comment,” American Economic Review, Vol. 90, No. 1, March 2000, pp. 319-324; Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway, “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas: Reply,” American Economic Review, Vol. 90, No. 1, March 2000, pp. 325-326; John A. List and Jason F. Shogren, “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas: Comment,” American Economic Review, Vol. 88, No. 5, December 1998, pp. 1350-1355; Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway, “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas: Reply,” American Economic Review, Vol. 88, No. 5, December 1998, pp. 1356-1357; Joel Waldfogel, “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas: Reply,” American Economic Review, Vol. 88, No. 5, December 1998, pp. 1358-1360; Tim Hyde, “Did Holiday Gift Giving Just Create a Multi-Billion-Dollar Loss for the Economy?” aeaweb.org, December 28, 2015; Josh Barro, “An Economist Goes Christmas Shopping,” New York Times, December 19, 2014; Andrew Silver, “Economists Want You to Have the Most Boring Christmas Possible,” wired.co.uk, December 17, 2020; and Chicago Booth School of Business, The Initiative on Markets, “Bah, Humbug,” December 17, 2013.