The Psychology of Pricing: A Gigantic List of Strategies

> If you want to organize resources and work in a centralized fashion, you still have to understand people, how they think and how they're motivated. You still have to decide who gets what, how they get it, who works on what, how to motivate them... You just do it directly instead of detouring through the abstraction of money and prices.

Understanding people, how they think, and how they're motivated, at the scale of modern economies, is necessarily an approximation. We can group people by demographic, and that gives us better coverage, but ultimately some percentage of people will never be adequately accounted for in our models.

At a smaller scale, say, 50 people, it becomes possible for each of the members of the economy to understand each others needs and motivations. It becomes possible for each person to state their needs and motivations and for others to judge whether these needs are adequately being met or if the person is being too greedy.

> Getting rid of the intermediate pricing abstraction doesn't magically solve the underlying problems.

At small scale, the pricing abstraction offers very little.

> Perhaps it lets you address those problems more directly, but it's not clear that that's a better approach—as programmers and computer sciences we should appreciate the power of abstraction and indirection to make solving problems easier.

I think this is a mistaken characterization of abstraction in computer science. Abstraction doesn't take you further from the problem you're trying to solve, it takes you closer to it. Indirection and abstraction are there to pull you away from the problems you aren't trying to solve: memory management, bit twiddling, etc.

When you talk about addressing problems more directly, that to me means you have created a better abstraction, not that you've removed an abstraction. If a layer of abstraction means you're dealing less directly with the problem, then it was the wrong abstraction and should be replaced or removed. YAGNI.

> The same energy would just have been spent in committees. Except, historically, the process would have ended up far more political than scientific.

I think this is also a function of the size of modern economies.

Size is a difficult problem to solve in itself, but situationally it has been solved with great success: see kibbutzes and communes.

> Which kind of explains why communism always leads to tyranny: it is based on the essentially tyrannical assumption that communists alone have the knowledge to decide how everyone else should be spending thier time, and the moral authority to impose that judgement on others by force.

Calm down McCarthy. Not every communist is a Soviet. Communism is a form of economy, not of government, and is entirely compatible with democracy.

> The problem is that no one has ever found a way of granting such power of central decision making in such a way that either:

> a) central planners have access to the information and computing power distributed in the market such that they can make well-judged decisions even by the theoretically pure criteria they claim to be using (that is, communism is inefficient)

> b) central planners have no incentive not to make decisions that serve their own interests to the detriment of all others (that is, communism is corrupt).

No one you know of has solved these problems, which only goes to show your ignorance.

Scale is an easy solution to both these problems--a small economy in which all parties can interact with all other parties removes the need for central planning entirely and allows all parties to balance their own interests with the interests of others.

> Given that theses results are incredibly robust and widely known, it is weird that anyone would suggest communism is an interesting alternative to anything. Reform capitalism all you want, but why bring up the political equivalent of a perpetual motion machine as the solution?

Given that you clearly are completely unaware of numerous working examples of democratic communism, what makes you feel qualified to have an opinion on the subject?

I appreciate your source cites. Well done.

Gold Star for never discounting without a reason. The amount of lost value due to this is insane. It is a constant issue I face. Most of the time, I find improving value perception to be the better, more sustainable answer to sluggish sales.