09-07-2004 07:29									#151
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Why would charging less than the max price create a crisis in the market?

Granted it doesn't happen often, and the natural inclination is to charge the most that people will buy, but if someone decided not to do that, it wouldn't really mess things up.

	09-07-2004 08:54									#152
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quote: Originally posted by Agathon One person doing it wouldn't create a problem, but everyone doing it would be.

Everyone being many small businesses, who btw employ more people than large corporations in an economy like Canada's?

Take the computer industry for example, there is a thriving small merchant market because those small merchants can deliver lower prices to the public on the same stuff than the larger retailers can. Or, they can make a bigger profit with the same price and spend some of that gap on better service to keep people coming back.

Don't stop at small independants though. Tell me, what is the focus of Walmart's advertising (at least in Canada)? How exactly have they sought the maximum price?

quote: If people don't aim for the best price they can get, what's the point of competition?

Business 101. Competition does not increase prices, it decreases them.

	09-07-2004 09:02									#153
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quote: Originally posted by OzzyKP Why would charging less than the max price create a crisis in the market? Granted it doesn't happen often, and the natural inclination is to charge the most that people will buy, but if someone decided not to do that, it wouldn't really mess things up.

In fact it doesn't, as the large number of discounters, price clubs, surplus outlets, and other varients of selling on price modelled businesses may indicate.

It happens, very often. In fact, selling on price is the most commonly used tool of business (IMO). Business gurus will coach and train merchants on how to get out of selling on price, but selling on price is the single easiest way to establish a business.

	09-07-2004 10:11									#154
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quote: Originally posted by St Leo Most of them are dead, but OK. That has never stopped me before. In fact, one time I got banned from graveyards in six countries... You are assuming that women didn't hunt and forgetting that women traded the roots and berries for sex from the men. Please excuse my skepticism about you yourself having spent any time away from the Ivory Tower. Perhaps, but it is not necessarily the Free Market kind of market. Pure Communism with worker control of the means of production[0] will still have the exchange of goods and services.

Check human history. It's very interesting how we continue to reinvent the wheel.

Women didn't trade roots and berries to the men for sex. Honestly. They may have occasionally traded a warm meal and their company for male company though. Service for service.

Market is market. The people never want a completely free market. Why? The excess behaviors under it offend people.

	09-07-2004 10:28									#155
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Humans are communal on the small scale but are brutally capitalist on the large. This is a result of our ancesteral social structure we share with chimps.

	09-07-2004 10:42									#156
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Humans are brutal capilatist on the small scale as well, Odin. The fact that you are charitable towards your sister or first cousin or son or daughter does not take away from the fact that you'll gouge your second cousin as much as you can. Heck, humans will gauge their own parents as much as possible, as well as their beloved sexual partners for their own profit. And that's never changed either... otherwise, only the insane could ever be greedy when dealing with their own near and dear relatives.

That's the problem with all these "humans are altruistic". It's just not true. If we were actually good and altruistic, then we wouldn't place our own interests over everyone elses. And all of us do that every day. Just like every one of our successful ancestors did.

Why do we cooperate? All studies in both Game Theory and Evolutionary Behavior show that cooperation is a survival tactic that the weak will take to be more successful to the strong. But remove that strong opposition, and their cooperation loses benefits, and they will turn on each other again. We cooperate to get a smaller share of something over a full share of nothing. But if we gain more by not cooperating, we choose that instead. If humans were genetically/biologically disposed to altruism, then we wouldn't have selfish behavior as a possibility, as it would have been genetically lost.