I haven’t finished a GED in Economics, but I would assume nobody would want to start doing that because, if you’re the only one doing it, you will perform twice as much babysitting as you get.
The analog in the real market would be downwards-sticky wages (that is, workers are very resistant to cuts in pay, even more so than layoffs; that’s why employers are more reluctant to cut wages of existing employees than to just get rid of them).
That’s not the analog; the analog would be the externality effect. An individual lowering (excessively high) prices imposes a loss on themselves but creates a positive externality on all other individuals; since the externality is never internalized, price adjustment is underprovided. If price adjustment is costly, the problem is even worse.
Wages are not thought to be sticky for this reason (real wages are not as obviously anticyclical as the argument would imply.).
I haven’t finished a GED in Economics, but I would assume nobody would want to start doing that because, if you’re the only one doing it, you will perform twice as much babysitting as you get.
The analog in the real market would be downwards-sticky wages (that is, workers are very resistant to cuts in pay, even more so than layoffs; that’s why employers are more reluctant to cut wages of existing employees than to just get rid of them).
That’s not the analog; the analog would be the externality effect. An individual lowering (excessively high) prices imposes a loss on themselves but creates a positive externality on all other individuals; since the externality is never internalized, price adjustment is underprovided. If price adjustment is costly, the problem is even worse.
Wages are not thought to be sticky for this reason (real wages are not as obviously anticyclical as the argument would imply.).