To treacherously switch sides to the pro-price gouging side:
The obvious solution is for shops to jack up prices as soon as an emergency situation occurs, thereby taking the wind out of speculators’ sails. Now businesses are not going to want to do this, since it’ll ruin their reputation with customers for minor short term gain.
So the actual solution is for the government to mandate price-gouging in emergency situations, this way businesses can do it, without having to bear the public opinion penalty.
If an area is declared a public disaster area, all shops are obligated to immediately implement scarcity prices. Scarcity prices work like this: as the stock of an item goes down, the price goes up by 100% of base cost for every 1% of missing stock. So by the time you only have 90% of toilet paper left in store, you’re already paying 10 * base cost for it.
Of course private citizens are also allowed to come in and sell whatever they want.
I’m not sure what incentive this creates for shop owners, like maybe they want to not bring stocks back up to normal, but whatever, I’m sure it’ll work out.
Modern society gives people too much incentive to live in floodable/hurricanable/earthquakable areas anyway, a bit more spice in their lives would shift populations to more reasonable regions to live in so it’s all good either way.
At best, this would only make sense if everyone had the same amount of money. They don’t. Mandatory price-gouging would mean the poor get screwed over.
Far better to have normal prices and mandatory purchase limits.
There’s a strain of thought that would say price allocation of society’s production itself is only ethical when everyone has the same amount of money, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
Actually, if you mandate normal prices (and often if you don’t, but the companies don’t want to lose customer goodwill) the companies will institute purchase limits on their own.
In other words, you’ve effectively argued for existing anti-gouging laws.
To treacherously switch sides to the pro-price gouging side:
The obvious solution is for shops to jack up prices as soon as an emergency situation occurs, thereby taking the wind out of speculators’ sails. Now businesses are not going to want to do this, since it’ll ruin their reputation with customers for minor short term gain.
So the actual solution is for the government to mandate price-gouging in emergency situations, this way businesses can do it, without having to bear the public opinion penalty.
If an area is declared a public disaster area, all shops are obligated to immediately implement scarcity prices. Scarcity prices work like this: as the stock of an item goes down, the price goes up by 100% of base cost for every 1% of missing stock. So by the time you only have 90% of toilet paper left in store, you’re already paying 10 * base cost for it.
Of course private citizens are also allowed to come in and sell whatever they want.
I’m not sure what incentive this creates for shop owners, like maybe they want to not bring stocks back up to normal, but whatever, I’m sure it’ll work out.
Modern society gives people too much incentive to live in floodable/hurricanable/earthquakable areas anyway, a bit more spice in their lives would shift populations to more reasonable regions to live in so it’s all good either way.
At best, this would only make sense if everyone had the same amount of money. They don’t. Mandatory price-gouging would mean the poor get screwed over.
Far better to have normal prices and mandatory purchase limits.
Of course :D
There’s a strain of thought that would say price allocation of society’s production itself is only ethical when everyone has the same amount of money, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
Actually, if you mandate normal prices (and often if you don’t, but the companies don’t want to lose customer goodwill) the companies will institute purchase limits on their own.
In other words, you’ve effectively argued for existing anti-gouging laws.