alt Hacker News>> you have a price ceiling by definition
Price ceiling definition: a government-imposed legal maximum price
My original comment: First come first served is a better <snipped for brevity>
This is not a legal maximum price, this is a legal maximum in the derivative of price.
> I didn't mention or allude to supply at all
>> get what I need with 100% chance than get what I need cheaply with 5% chance
How do you square these two statements? One claims 100% supply certainty when no such thing exists in this context. Without making certain assumptions (unstated, but ludicrous, assumptions are rife in economics discourse), you can't state much of value about which buyer will get the goods in the surge pricing model, you especially cannot say that the buyer with the larger wallet will always win. Think for a second what assumptions you've made to this point in the conversation - you're still down the rabbit hole of price ceilings in the comment chain thus far.
>> The empirical history of price ceilings is there
Not disputed but as per your call out of definition above, not relevant.
To make the point further - the name for a limit on rate of change of price is not a price ceiling, anymore than the 0-60 time of a car is its top speed limit.
>> you thought that I was talking about supply instead of resource allocation
My challenge to you is to name the assumptions you've identified in your reasoning around resource allocation. I'm confident i can point out the deficiencies in your model because that is the nature of models.
>> you should study elementary economics
That's a great idea, a really good follow on from that is to identify logical fallacies you discover i. that process, especially those so accepted that it's not a stretch to say they are underpinning the discipline. A good example of that would be the conjectural origin theory of money but i digress.
> My original comment: First come first served is a better
Retailers are first come first serve. The first customer to buy product gets the next unit of inventory.
If you’re trying to argue that retailers need to be forced to set a retail price for each unit of in-stock inventory and then be forced to sell each unit at that price later no matter what the market rate does in the mean time, that’s an awful idea.
I’m sure you don’t mind when retailers decide to give discounts or put things on sale, do you? If the market price drops, they reduce selling price. Same thing when market rate goes up.
Forcing retailers to price things how you want doesn’t change supply and demand. It would only force retailers to add extra margin into their prices to account for the added risk of the government forcing their hand in sale prices.