221–230 of 402 posts
“asymmetric information warfare” I think that’s a great term in explaining how “the free market” doesn’t work.
The "free" in "free market" refers in part to free flow of information. Surfacing information about prices is kind of the point of a market. It's a mechanism that assigns prices "automatically" (as contrasted with central planning, etc.) I don't know much about economics but I know, or think I know, that much.)
As an Austrian dev and consumer who has closely followed this throughout the year: it's soo frustrating to see how we're ripped off for no good reason, but nothing changes and nobody cares. Hats off to Mario for sticking with the topic and not losing his mind over this infuriating madness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Austria's real problem is that it's a bad business environment with high taxes and tons of regulation. It means that there are only a few players in that space that ultimately dominate it. Small companies could not even enter that space because the regulation does not give them any space to innovate (for instance free selection of products, other opening times).
More generally, the EU has problems with market efficiency in general. The law allowing mail-order businesses to refuse to sell across “state lines” means markets are very atomized and dominated by one or two players who, spoiler, don’t really compete aggressively on pricing. The idea of Newegg refusing to sell to me because I don’t live in California is insane from an American perspective but that’s what the EU has…
[dupe]
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37530314
As compensation for luu (surely one of the best HN submitters of all time) I've put this one in the second-chance pool, which will give it a random placement on the front page:
Birth Order (1999) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37532299 - Sept 2023 (1 comment)
If anyone wants to read a long rabbit-hole description of how we handle these cases, I wrote one for some reason a couple weekends ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364619
As an Austrian dev and consumer who has closely followed this throughout the year: it's soo frustrating to see how we're ripped off for no good reason, but nothing changes and nobody cares. Hats off to Mario for sticking with the topic and not losing his mind over this infuriating madness.
Companies need adults in the room to keep them from behaving badly. This operating under the observation that they behave badly when not being watched, so a thesis to be tested more than an assertion of fact.
At a minimum they arguably behave worse when there are no consequences, hence inflation becoming air cover to raise prices when prices weren’t being raised before as there was no “good reason” for them to go up.
I love this project. “Index data” projects like this seem ripe as a category, especially with AI and Ml systems providing ready observability on changes and trends.
The question is how to get enough conclusions and salient observations that spur people to the social science outrage factor levels so that they take action.
Or perhaps we should just accept that companies will use these technologies to optimize everything against consumers and not deploy them in counterinsurgency resistance-style whitehat fashion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Austria's real problem is that it's a bad business environment with high taxes and tons of regulation. It means that there are only a few players in that space that ultimately dominate it. Small companies could not even enter that space because the regulation does not give them any space to innovate (for instance free selection of products, other opening times).
More generally, the EU has problems with market efficiency in general. The law allowing mail-order businesses to refuse to sell across “state lines” means markets are very atomized and dominated by one or two players who, spoiler, don’t really compete aggressively on pricing. The idea of Newegg refusing to sell to me because I don’t live in California is insane from an American perspective but that’s what the EU has…
Fellow Austrian here. Nice price comparison project, but the elephant in the room is that grocery store prices in Germany are 20-40% lower for the same product. Explanation from the supermarket chains are shady at best (more stores per capita compared to Germany, they are forced to buy from more expensive Austrian distributors etc). I heard similar things from Belgium (higher prices than in France) My point is: we ne…
> Explanation from the supermarket chains are shady at best Do you suspect there is some other reason? Like, they can get away with it in Austria but not Germany? What’s a “non-shady” explanation in your eyes?
Germany has the luck of being a big country with scale effects and healthy grocery store competition.
All the supermarkets have full inventory databases, they could send you an updated price list of every product every five minutes at basically no cost. This smacks of a legislature don't/won't seek advice from experts. It's a start I suppose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>it shows the power of smart, tech-capable citizens Consumers in Austria who travel abroad/to Germany often, already knew they were getting scammed for a long time now, but couldn't prove it and now they can, so the more important question is what will come out of it, as the data shows the big retailers clearly cooperating on price fixing. My guess, nothing, as the government regulators who are supposed to watch over…
If the retail stores are price fixing then why are their stock prices down so much this year? Their investors are getting savaged. What did they do with all this extra cashflow?