Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's rarely actually true for anyone that wants to operate for more than a short time period. There are significant costs to gouging your customers. Anything from it being illegal, to it encouraging competition and your customers being motivated to actively flee you and shit on your reputation. The correct pricing strategy for people that don't have a long term enforceable monopoly is "whatever most customers are w…
I think you've hit on what always bothers me about this sentiment. It is obvious that at any point in time you can charge the maximum customers are willing to pay, but that allows for disruption through the channels like competition. The opposite where you charge the minimum to continue providing the goods or services seems optimal, though, leads to a company with zero profits that is unattractive to investment. Is t…
Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility
#141I'm not an economist, and can't point to to anything in particular, but I would be skeptical of anything that claimed a general approach to that. "Optimal" depends entirely on what you're optimizing for, which is basically an infinite possibility space. I could need a significant amount of revenue immediately to accomplish a desired business development, or I could have plenty of cash and want to build a large and loyal long term customer base at the cost of immediate profit. As you say, successful businesses exist doing pretty much everything. The only limiting factor is being a viable ongoing concern (and that can just mean having a rich backer). I'm sure there are things discussing optimizing based on small slices of the possibility space though (but all the normal caveats about economists making dumb assumptions that rarely apply to humans apply even to those).