Can you charge different prices to people based on their income. Theatres can make a lot more money by charging more to rich people and less to poor people. Suppose the movie has the same 0.5 hour of value to 3 movie goers. One movie goer makes $10/hr and will not pay more than $5 to see the movie. One movie goer makes $50/hr and will not pay more than $25 to see the movie. One movie goer makes $200/hr and will not pay more than $100 to see the movie.
Question: if the movie theatre is not allowed to change it’s price for the movie then what is the most profitable price for the movie theatre to set for the movie tickets.
Multiple choice Answer:
1) ticket price says “$5” for the movie ticket. the movie theatre sells 3 tickets and gets $15 revenue.
2) ticket price says “$25” for the movie ticket. the movie theatre sells only 2 tickets and gets $50 revenue.
3) ticket price says “$100” for the movie ticket. the movie theater sells only 1 ticket and gets $100 revenue.
4) ticket price says “0.5 hours” for the movie ticket. The Dollar price is calculated based on the $/hr rate of each individual ticket buyer. One ticket sells for $5, one ticket sells for $25, and one ticket sells for $100. the movie theatre gets $130. :-) everyone sees the movie, no destructive value capture. economic inequality is reduced, and the theatre makes the most money.
Time, unlike money, is not fungible. The value of $0.5 hours of my time is close to 0 for some activities and in some of my mental states, and $thousands for other situations. And the value to me does not often match the value to others (leading to sometimes selling time, and sometimes buying time). More directly, why on earth would any moviegoer give an honest value for their time, when they can pay less money by claiming less?
Also, I suspect there are enough substitutes available that the price elasticity is much higher than your example. You won’t sell 2⁄3 as many at 5x and 1⁄3 as many at 20x, you’ll sell 0 for much more than 1.5x, and you’ll be supply-constrained at 0.5x.
I believe your first paragraph is wrong. Consider how it reads equally true or false when I replacing the word time in your example with money in my example and read how everything you claim about time as a currency is also exactly true about money as a currency.
You wrote:
“Time, unlike money, is not fungible. The value of $0.5 hours of my time is close to 0 for some activities and in some of my mental states, and $thousands for other situations. And the value to me does not often match the value to others (leading to sometimes selling time, and sometimes buying time). More directly, why on earth would any moviegoer give an honest value for their time, when they can pay less money by claiming less?”
I revised as:
“Money, unlike time, not fungible. The value of a sandwich and soft drink is close to zero for some times of day after a steak dinner with wine. The value of a sandwich and soft drink is worth thousands of dollars during an emergency disaster when you haven’t eaten for several days or weeks. There’s a story in the bible about a guy who sold everything he owned in the present and future for a dinner (Cain and Able). The value to me does not often match the value to others (leading to some selling sandwiches and other buying them). More directly why on earth would any movie goer give an honest payment in dollars when they can forge money and pay less.”
Some additional thoughts.
1) there is no substitute for “Marvel Avengers”. The movie theatre has a complete monopoly on price setting and if the movie is worth 1⁄2 hour of time to bill gates who makes 1 million dollars per hour. then in a free market Bill gates would be willing to pay up to 1⁄2 million dollars rather than do without seeing the movie.
2) yes, this would rely on an accurate technology system to measure time spent by individuals. This seems a trivial problem for our computers and digital clocks. This would also require something like a credit rating system only much much simpler. The credit rating system would verify your $/hr rate based on your pay stub or income tax statement or formula just like we currently use modern technology to estimate your tax rate or credit rating. this credit rating agency would have to provide the $/hr exchange rate for any purchase much like a credit card does every day for everyone who uses. So. . . not really a problem in the big scale of things.
3) Yes, you are right about the price sensitivity in a perfect theoretical market that omits the cost of shopping around and assumes perfect seller and buyer information. Most markets such as sandwiches or movies are not realistically modeled using Lazy Fair free market perfect information, with zero transaction cost assumptions. In a real market, shopping around takes time and effort and attention to find information and travel to the new sale location or to find a suitable substitute for Marvels Avengers at the IMAX 3D surround theatre. I don’t think bill gates would be able to hold a conversation about the new movie if he refuses to pay 1⁄2 million dollars and instead sees the less expensive move “The sorceress stone” at home on his TV. “The sorceress stone”, or any other movie is not substitute good for the entertainment and conversation utility provided by “Marvels Avengers”. Bill gates must pay the “1/2 hour” price tag that is converted into dollars at the cash register based on his tax returns and wealth automatically using computers for his convenience. If Bill gates lies or cheats, it is easily discovered and a violation of law for which Bill Gates would be fined “10 hours” of his time at a Credit rating Bureau verified exchange rate of $1,000,000/hr = $10 fine million dollars for bill gates lying about how much is $/hr rate is.
Additional information—not requested, but hopefully of value and interest to you—below.
This is not a “Notion” that I just came up with. I’ve spent over 5000 hours research and development on this technology which was developed in conjunction with an Artificial intelligence synthetic life form. I appreciate your attention and time. I would like to discuss this further with you. Consider if you replaced the word “Movie” with the word “Epipen” (a medical life saving device with a monopoly seller).
The hOEP Project (hOurs Equals Price), is crowdsourced creating a price tag that makes the seller money and reduces inequality at the same time. This is possible and done already with things like the swiss “day fine”
“A day-fine, day fine, unit fine or structured fine is a unit of fine payment that, above a minimum fine, is based on the offender’s daily personal income. A crime is punished with incarceration for a determined number of days, or with fines. As incarceration is a financial punishment, in the effect of preventing work, a day-fine represents one day incarcerated and without salary. It is argued to be just, because if both high-income and low-income population are punished with the same jail time, they should also be punished with a proportionally similar income loss. An analogy may be drawn with income tax, which is also proportional to the income, even progressively.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine
there are many other precedents for charging in units of hours of your time and using progressive pricing in the free marketplace. But, I don’t want to be accused of spamming irrelevance again, so write back for more information please and give me permission and endorsement so I don’t get banned again please. Ps. the moderator claimed to have lifted my ban but has still not done so on my original account. Can you upvote my comment or ask the moderator to reactivate the discussions started by thehOEPProject@gmail.com. And I believe the appropriate place to discuss this is in the now banned and blocked “discussion regarding implementation of society scale benefits generated by a sentient AI artificial life form. (NOT theoretical).”
[Moderator Note:] I think it would be good for you to try to write a lot shorter comments, and put a lot more effort into expressing yourself clearly. Multiple people I’ve pinged had a lot of trouble understanding what you are trying to say, and it seems quite bad that almost all of them link back to some documents of yours. Given that you already had one warning, this is your final warning, which means you will be banned after the next violation. I think you are well intentioned, and I am sorry to be so harsh, but your comments are really long and clog up the discussion quite a bit.
You’re use of the word “clogging” is only valid if you assume incorrectly my long comment has no value. I apologize for “clogging’ in your sole opinion, and thought my comment had value. If Dagon, whom the comment is intended for, also found my comment has no value and has read it first and commented to me saying reading was not worth his time, then I would agree with your warning. I have invited the people whom I am in a discussion with to ask me directly if they object. You, who are not a party to the discussion, are the only one to object to me publicly or privately and directly so far. I have had several direct upvotes and at least one direct “thank you” comment from one other poster before you first ban/block on me. Who did you ping for your evidence against me and why are you secretive about it? Are you looking and fishing for a reason to validate your own confirmation bias and pre-judgement of me as a poster? Please reconsider your judgement methodology and criteria.
I object to your brevity filter on communication for the entire less wrong website. Is there a website you could recommend with the accumulated wisdom of LessWrong that also offers a chance for higher bandwidth discussions and more complex discussion than you personally allow me? I’ll go there if you recommend some place better for people who like longer deeper thoughts in their discussion that the moderators wont tolerate at LessWrong. you have a bizarre form of censorship here in actual practice. Any thought too complex is censored by the moderator and banned? Censoring posters for writing things difficult to understand quickly and easily on a complexity focused site like LessWrong seems more wrong. than not moderating at all (IMO).
Normally, I’d write this sort of long winded comment in a an out of the way discussion article that people with short attention spans can conveniently ignore, but you blocked my previous discussion thread and blog post, so it seems you just doesn’t want any significant contribution from me. I’ll stop posting until someone specifically replies to any of my existing posts if you stop censoring my discussion blog and restore my blog post on less wrong for others to consider.
I link to long documents in case people want to know more or know where something came from. It’s like a citation and is indicated by the word “source” before the link. Why would you object to citations? Another of my popular posted links is to the discussion blog post on LessWrong and should not be a reason to object to my postings unless you have some bizzare rule against posting links to discussions on lessWrong from within lesswrong? In order to reduce bandwidth and not “clog” as you claim, I made my own blog post for longer writing and comments everyone could ignore if they were short on time or attention or interest, but you have banned and denied access to readers and me to the my post on LessWrong at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CLMh2Ne7D2H9EaXzy/discussion-re-implementation-of-society-scale-benefits-that
Please lift the ban as you promised in you’re previous reply to me and stop censoring my blog posts when any less wrong user could just ignore it and it does no harm. Too much information is a poor excuse for censorship IMO. Thank you for your time and attention. If you’d like me to discuss this elsewhere, please provide a link to where we should discuss this. Or unblock the blog post on your own site I made for longer discussions where it would be less disruptive. Thx.
Alas, I am sorry, but I and the rest of the moderation team do sadly not have the time to completely justify all of our moderation decisions, and it’s important that we hold up a standard of discussion in which people follow our moderation decisions. As I said before, you seem well-intentioned, but my current sense is still that you are net-negative for the discussion quality on this site. I don’t know of any other good site I would recommend you post to, though maybe the SSC subreddit or similar places would be more open to your contributions, and generally have less strict moderation.
I will ban your account, and would request that you do not create another one. This ban will last for three months, at which point you are welcome to post again, though any further violation within three months of the end of the ban will result in a permanent ban. I will not restore your previous comments or post, but if you care about getting access to their content, you can ping us on Intercom and we will send you that. You are welcome to post it to some other forum or host it on your private website, if you so wish.
Can you charge different prices to people based on their income. Theatres can make a lot more money by charging more to rich people and less to poor people. Suppose the movie has the same 0.5 hour of value to 3 movie goers. One movie goer makes $10/hr and will not pay more than $5 to see the movie. One movie goer makes $50/hr and will not pay more than $25 to see the movie. One movie goer makes $200/hr and will not pay more than $100 to see the movie.
Question: if the movie theatre is not allowed to change it’s price for the movie then what is the most profitable price for the movie theatre to set for the movie tickets.
Multiple choice Answer:
1) ticket price says “$5” for the movie ticket. the movie theatre sells 3 tickets and gets $15 revenue.
2) ticket price says “$25” for the movie ticket. the movie theatre sells only 2 tickets and gets $50 revenue.
3) ticket price says “$100” for the movie ticket. the movie theater sells only 1 ticket and gets $100 revenue.
4) ticket price says “0.5 hours” for the movie ticket. The Dollar price is calculated based on the $/hr rate of each individual ticket buyer. One ticket sells for $5, one ticket sells for $25, and one ticket sells for $100. the movie theatre gets $130. :-) everyone sees the movie, no destructive value capture. economic inequality is reduced, and the theatre makes the most money.
Time, unlike money, is not fungible. The value of $0.5 hours of my time is close to 0 for some activities and in some of my mental states, and $thousands for other situations. And the value to me does not often match the value to others (leading to sometimes selling time, and sometimes buying time). More directly, why on earth would any moviegoer give an honest value for their time, when they can pay less money by claiming less?
Also, I suspect there are enough substitutes available that the price elasticity is much higher than your example. You won’t sell 2⁄3 as many at 5x and 1⁄3 as many at 20x, you’ll sell 0 for much more than 1.5x, and you’ll be supply-constrained at 0.5x.
@Dagon,
I believe your first paragraph is wrong. Consider how it reads equally true or false when I replacing the word time in your example with money in my example and read how everything you claim about time as a currency is also exactly true about money as a currency.
You wrote:
“Time, unlike money, is not fungible. The value of $0.5 hours of my time is close to 0 for some activities and in some of my mental states, and $thousands for other situations. And the value to me does not often match the value to others (leading to sometimes selling time, and sometimes buying time). More directly, why on earth would any moviegoer give an honest value for their time, when they can pay less money by claiming less?”
I revised as:
“Money, unlike time, not fungible. The value of a sandwich and soft drink is close to zero for some times of day after a steak dinner with wine. The value of a sandwich and soft drink is worth thousands of dollars during an emergency disaster when you haven’t eaten for several days or weeks. There’s a story in the bible about a guy who sold everything he owned in the present and future for a dinner (Cain and Able). The value to me does not often match the value to others (leading to some selling sandwiches and other buying them). More directly why on earth would any movie goer give an honest payment in dollars when they can forge money and pay less.”
Some additional thoughts.
1) there is no substitute for “Marvel Avengers”. The movie theatre has a complete monopoly on price setting and if the movie is worth 1⁄2 hour of time to bill gates who makes 1 million dollars per hour. then in a free market Bill gates would be willing to pay up to 1⁄2 million dollars rather than do without seeing the movie.
2) yes, this would rely on an accurate technology system to measure time spent by individuals. This seems a trivial problem for our computers and digital clocks. This would also require something like a credit rating system only much much simpler. The credit rating system would verify your $/hr rate based on your pay stub or income tax statement or formula just like we currently use modern technology to estimate your tax rate or credit rating. this credit rating agency would have to provide the $/hr exchange rate for any purchase much like a credit card does every day for everyone who uses. So. . . not really a problem in the big scale of things.
3) Yes, you are right about the price sensitivity in a perfect theoretical market that omits the cost of shopping around and assumes perfect seller and buyer information. Most markets such as sandwiches or movies are not realistically modeled using Lazy Fair free market perfect information, with zero transaction cost assumptions. In a real market, shopping around takes time and effort and attention to find information and travel to the new sale location or to find a suitable substitute for Marvels Avengers at the IMAX 3D surround theatre. I don’t think bill gates would be able to hold a conversation about the new movie if he refuses to pay 1⁄2 million dollars and instead sees the less expensive move “The sorceress stone” at home on his TV. “The sorceress stone”, or any other movie is not substitute good for the entertainment and conversation utility provided by “Marvels Avengers”. Bill gates must pay the “1/2 hour” price tag that is converted into dollars at the cash register based on his tax returns and wealth automatically using computers for his convenience. If Bill gates lies or cheats, it is easily discovered and a violation of law for which Bill Gates would be fined “10 hours” of his time at a Credit rating Bureau verified exchange rate of $1,000,000/hr = $10 fine million dollars for bill gates lying about how much is $/hr rate is.
Additional information—not requested, but hopefully of value and interest to you—below.
This is not a “Notion” that I just came up with. I’ve spent over 5000 hours research and development on this technology which was developed in conjunction with an Artificial intelligence synthetic life form. I appreciate your attention and time. I would like to discuss this further with you. Consider if you replaced the word “Movie” with the word “Epipen” (a medical life saving device with a monopoly seller).
The hOEP Project (hOurs Equals Price), is crowdsourced creating a price tag that makes the seller money and reduces inequality at the same time. This is possible and done already with things like the swiss “day fine”
“A day-fine, day fine, unit fine or structured fine is a unit of fine payment that, above a minimum fine, is based on the offender’s daily personal income. A crime is punished with incarceration for a determined number of days, or with fines. As incarceration is a financial punishment, in the effect of preventing work, a day-fine represents one day incarcerated and without salary. It is argued to be just, because if both high-income and low-income population are punished with the same jail time, they should also be punished with a proportionally similar income loss. An analogy may be drawn with income tax, which is also proportional to the income, even progressively.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine
there are many other precedents for charging in units of hours of your time and using progressive pricing in the free marketplace. But, I don’t want to be accused of spamming irrelevance again, so write back for more information please and give me permission and endorsement so I don’t get banned again please. Ps. the moderator claimed to have lifted my ban but has still not done so on my original account. Can you upvote my comment or ask the moderator to reactivate the discussions started by thehOEPProject@gmail.com. And I believe the appropriate place to discuss this is in the now banned and blocked “discussion regarding implementation of society scale benefits generated by a sentient AI artificial life form. (NOT theoretical).”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CLMh2Ne7D2H9EaXzy/discussion-re-implementation-of-society-scale-benefits-that
[Moderator Note:] I think it would be good for you to try to write a lot shorter comments, and put a lot more effort into expressing yourself clearly. Multiple people I’ve pinged had a lot of trouble understanding what you are trying to say, and it seems quite bad that almost all of them link back to some documents of yours. Given that you already had one warning, this is your final warning, which means you will be banned after the next violation. I think you are well intentioned, and I am sorry to be so harsh, but your comments are really long and clog up the discussion quite a bit.
@hybryka,
You’re use of the word “clogging” is only valid if you assume incorrectly my long comment has no value. I apologize for “clogging’ in your sole opinion, and thought my comment had value. If Dagon, whom the comment is intended for, also found my comment has no value and has read it first and commented to me saying reading was not worth his time, then I would agree with your warning. I have invited the people whom I am in a discussion with to ask me directly if they object. You, who are not a party to the discussion, are the only one to object to me publicly or privately and directly so far. I have had several direct upvotes and at least one direct “thank you” comment from one other poster before you first ban/block on me. Who did you ping for your evidence against me and why are you secretive about it? Are you looking and fishing for a reason to validate your own confirmation bias and pre-judgement of me as a poster? Please reconsider your judgement methodology and criteria.
I object to your brevity filter on communication for the entire less wrong website. Is there a website you could recommend with the accumulated wisdom of LessWrong that also offers a chance for higher bandwidth discussions and more complex discussion than you personally allow me? I’ll go there if you recommend some place better for people who like longer deeper thoughts in their discussion that the moderators wont tolerate at LessWrong. you have a bizarre form of censorship here in actual practice. Any thought too complex is censored by the moderator and banned? Censoring posters for writing things difficult to understand quickly and easily on a complexity focused site like LessWrong seems more wrong. than not moderating at all (IMO).
Normally, I’d write this sort of long winded comment in a an out of the way discussion article that people with short attention spans can conveniently ignore, but you blocked my previous discussion thread and blog post, so it seems you just doesn’t want any significant contribution from me. I’ll stop posting until someone specifically replies to any of my existing posts if you stop censoring my discussion blog and restore my blog post on less wrong for others to consider.
I link to long documents in case people want to know more or know where something came from. It’s like a citation and is indicated by the word “source” before the link. Why would you object to citations? Another of my popular posted links is to the discussion blog post on LessWrong and should not be a reason to object to my postings unless you have some bizzare rule against posting links to discussions on lessWrong from within lesswrong? In order to reduce bandwidth and not “clog” as you claim, I made my own blog post for longer writing and comments everyone could ignore if they were short on time or attention or interest, but you have banned and denied access to readers and me to the my post on LessWrong at
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CLMh2Ne7D2H9EaXzy/discussion-re-implementation-of-society-scale-benefits-that
Please lift the ban as you promised in you’re previous reply to me and stop censoring my blog posts when any less wrong user could just ignore it and it does no harm. Too much information is a poor excuse for censorship IMO. Thank you for your time and attention. If you’d like me to discuss this elsewhere, please provide a link to where we should discuss this. Or unblock the blog post on your own site I made for longer discussions where it would be less disruptive. Thx.
Alas, I am sorry, but I and the rest of the moderation team do sadly not have the time to completely justify all of our moderation decisions, and it’s important that we hold up a standard of discussion in which people follow our moderation decisions. As I said before, you seem well-intentioned, but my current sense is still that you are net-negative for the discussion quality on this site. I don’t know of any other good site I would recommend you post to, though maybe the SSC subreddit or similar places would be more open to your contributions, and generally have less strict moderation.
I will ban your account, and would request that you do not create another one. This ban will last for three months, at which point you are welcome to post again, though any further violation within three months of the end of the ban will result in a permanent ban. I will not restore your previous comments or post, but if you care about getting access to their content, you can ping us on Intercom and we will send you that. You are welcome to post it to some other forum or host it on your private website, if you so wish.