The kerfuffle over public-sector unions in Wisconsin has captured the imagination of the chattering class to the point that unless I wish for my blog to lapse further into irrelevance I must break my silence on this topic. I am not a labor economist, and I have never had the privilege of visiting Wisconsin, which strikes me [...]
Tags: competition, monopoly, rent seeking, unions, Wisconsin
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On Saturday, I wrote a post asking why Apple offers free engraving on iPods and iPads. My answer was that they do this to decrease the value of the secondary market. I wrote the post for my usual readership, which is highly economically literate. Surprisingly, this post received about 100 times more attention than usual, [...]
Tags: Apple, durable goods problem, economic profit, engraving, Hacker News, iPad, iPod, Louis Vuitton, monopoly, secondary market
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A lot of pixels have been spilled in the last week about how Facebook has seized control of the Internet with their new API initiatives. This is supposedly troubling: unlike Google, Facebook might be evil, the hand-wringers say. But even if Facebook is able to monopolize a large segment of our time on the Internet, [...]
Tags: economics, Facebook, Google, monopoly, natural monopoly, network effects
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