I was randomly visiting those blogs of authors, journalists, economists ERPZ link to. It is a good way to find inspiration for things to write about or to hunt for stuff to read. I stumbled upon Harford’s column article on Financial Times a week back. He discusses briefly on the importance of feedbacks and how they mess things up sometimes.
From Harford’s blog, I also learnt about this new book, Scroogenomics by Joel Waldfogel. It looks like a pretty interesting short read but I probably would be spending on it and I’m not too confident that it’ll be available in Singapore. Harford presented a short take on the concept that Professor Waldfogel conceived in 2005.
Professor Waldfogel believes that:
We make less-informed choices [when we buy gifts], max out on credit to buy gifts worth less than the money spent, and leave recipients less than satisfied, creating [… a] “deadweight loss” [much like when there is an externality present in the market].
In some way, when we perceive the giver and receiver as a single entity (the consumer) and the seller of the gift as the producer and explore this consumer-producer relationship, the deadweight loss is quite evident. It is like having a weird syndrome where you confuse your preferences and lose the ability to put a value on the goods you purchase. That would mean you might be willing to pay $30 for a Large Fries at MacDonalds and try to haggle for a bed at IKEA for $6 – both of which results in losses if the transactions succeed (you lose in the first case and IKEA loses in the second).
Tyler Cowen’s Discover Your Inner Economist, however, argues that gifts are signaling tools for the giver to create certain impression in the receiver of himself/herself. That suggests that the losses are probably compensated in the market through the creation of this impression, through any changes in the chemistry of the relationship between the receiver and the giver of the gift. Perhaps given that the consumer from this perspective is just the giver, as long as the receiver gives him/her enough face by feigning joy (when there isn’t any) upon receiving the gift, there’ll be no deadweight loss. Actually there is, borne by the receiver for the effort.
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