Price Gouging in a Pandemic

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has led to acute supply shortages across the country as well as concerns over price increases amid surging demand. In the process, it has reawakened a debate about whether and how to regulate “price gouging.” Animating this controversy is a longstanding conflict between laissez-faire economics (which champions price fluctuations as a means to allocate scarce goods) and perceived norms of consumer fairness (which are thought to cut strongly against sharp price hikes amid shortages). This article provides a new, empirically grounded perspective on the price gouging debate that challenges several aspects of conventional wisdom. We report results from a survey experiment administered to a large, nationally representative sample during the height of the pandemic’s initial wave. We presented participants with a variety of vignettes involving price increases, eliciting their reactions along two dimensions: the degree of unfairness they perceived, and the legal response they favored. Overall, we find that participants are more tolerant of price increases than either the existing behavioral economics literature predicts or most state price gouging statutes countenance. But we also find that price fairness perceptions can be highly sensitive to context. For example, participants are much more tolerant of moderate price increases if they previously are asked to contemplate large price increases. Moreover, participants are substantially more willing to accept a price increase when it is accompanied by an apology and/or a public-minded rationale (such as supporting furloughed employees). We explore the implications of our findings for behavioral economics, pricing practices, and legal reform

The Price of Fairness

The COVID-19 pandemic led to acute supply shortages across the country as well as concerns over price increases amid surging demand. In the process, it reawakened a debate about whether and how to regulate “price gouging”—a controversy that continues as inflation has accelerated even as the pandemic abates. Animating this debate is a longstanding conflict between laissez-faire economics, which champions price fluctuations as a means to allocate scarce goods, and perceived norms of consumer fairness, which are thought to cut strongly against sharp price hikes amid shortages. This Article provides a new, empirically grounded perspective on the price gouging debate that challenges several aspects of conventional wisdom. We report results from a survey experiment administered to a large, nationally representative sample during the height of the pandemic’s initial wave. We presented participants with a variety of vignettes involving price increases, eliciting their reactions along two dimensions: the degree of unfairness they perceived, and the legal response they favored. Overall, we find that participants are more tolerant of price increases than either the existing behavioral economics literature predicts or most state price gouging statutes countenance. But we also find that price fairness perceptions can be highly sensitive to context. For example, participants are much more tolerant of moderate price increases if they previously are asked to contemplate large price increases. Moreover, participants are substantially more willing to accept a price increase when it is accompanied by an apology or a public-minded rationale, such as supporting furloughed employees, or both. We explore the implications of our findings for behavioral economics, pricing practices, and legal reform

University of San Diego News Print Media Coverage 2004.11

Printed clippings housed in folders with a table of contents arranged by topic.https://digital.sandiego.edu/print-media/1022/thumbnail.jp

Public Law and Economics

This comprehensive textbook applies economic analysis to public law. The economic analysis of law has revolutionized legal scholarship and teaching in the last half-century, but it has focused mostly on private law, business law, and criminal law. This book extends the analysis to fundamental topics in public law, such as the separation of government powers, regulation by agencies, constitutional rights, and elections. Every public law involves six fundamental processes of government: bargaining, voting, entrenching, delegating, adjudicating, and enforcing. The book devotes two chapters to each process, beginning with the economic theory and then applying the theory to a wide range of puzzles and problems in law. Each chapter concentrates on cases and legal doctrine, showing the relevance of economics to the work of lawyers and judges. Featuring lucid, accessible writing and engaging examples, the book addresses enduring topics in public law as well as modern controversies, including gerrymandering, voter identification laws, and qualified immunity for police

Public Law and Economics

This comprehensive textbook applies economic analysis to public law. The economic analysis of law has revolutionized legal scholarship and teaching in the last half-century, but it has focused mostly on private law, business law, and criminal law. This book extends the analysis to fundamental topics in public law, such as the separation of government powers, regulation by agencies, constitutional rights, and elections. Every public law involves six fundamental processes of government: bargaining, voting, entrenching, delegating, adjudicating, and enforcing. The book devotes two chapters to each process, beginning with the economic theory and then applying the theory to a wide range of puzzles and problems in law. Each chapter concentrates on cases and legal doctrine, showing the relevance of economics to the work of lawyers and judges. Featuring lucid, accessible writing and engaging examples, the book addresses enduring topics in public law as well as modern controversies, including gerrymandering, voter identification laws, and qualified immunity for police

Supreme Court Opinion Authorship Attribution on a Case-by-Case Basis

This thesis analyzes the authorship of Supreme Court opinions and the theory that Justices on that Court might be delegating portions, if not the majority, of opinion authorship to their clerks. I test the theories that as Justices age they are more likely to delegate, and that delegation has increased across all justices over the past several decades of the Court’s history. I employ a content analysis method known as stylometry to assign authorship attributions on a case by case basis and use those attributions to inform larger trends regarding authorship. I ultimately find that there is little evidence to support the age or time-period theories but that there is significant variation across Justices in attribution, indicating that clerks are likely playing a large and measurable role in opinion drafting

Disciplined intuition: subjective aspects of judgment and decision making in Child Protective Services

This qualitative study was aimed at developing an understanding of how persons involved in the investigation or deliberation of child abuse and neglect cases think and feel about the process of weighing evidence and drawing conclusions from it. Twenty investigators, supervisors, and administrators employed by the Child Protective Services agency in Texas were asked to describe cases they had investigated or reviewed that had been particularly difficult because of conflicting or ambiguous evidence. They were also asked opinion questions about the agency's actuarial risk assessment instrument and the concept of preponderance of evidence. Finally, participants were asked to respond to two short case vignettes describing allegations of sexual abuse. Constant comparative and narrative analysis of interview data revealed that the process of case deliberation in CPS makes use of both intuitive and analytic decision-making styles, and there is a general movement from intuition to analysis as a case ascends the decision-making hierarchy. This movement entails a shift from narrative forms of thought and an outcome-oriented ethic to analytic forms of thought and a rule-based ethic. Though intuitive decision making is at least partly guided from personal experience and personal values, and does produce error because of that, it is nonetheless a form of rationality as capable of being guided by scrupulousness and fidelity to truth as analysis is. The personal value and outcome-oriented ethic that intuition brings to the decision making process not only cannot be eliminated, it is necessary to the program's achievement of its mission. It is recommended that the training of new investigators should, first, acknowledge the large role that intuitive thinking plays in CPS decision making and, second, develop ways to help decision makers discipline intuition, in the words of one participant, and to create conditions that foster its optimal functioning

Bowdoin Orient v.134, no.1-24 (2004-2005)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-2000s/1005/thumbnail.jp

Luxury Romanticism: The Quarto Book in the Romantic Period

This dissertation explores the cultural presence of the quarto book in Romantic-era Britain and argues that the format classed the period\u27s defining literary ideologies--from sentimentalism, to liberalism, to Wordsworthian Romanticism, to orientalism--as luxuries meant exclusively for the nation\u27s wealthiest consumers. Chapter 1 situates the quarto within the context of the period\u27s luxury debates and advances a conception of the quarto as the era\u27s predominant luxury format. Focusing on Oliver Goldsmith\u27s The Deserted Village, Chapter 2 argues that early quarto editions of the poem classed the sympathetic feeling it celebrated as the unique privilege of a readerly elite and describes how the poem was later appropriated and repurposed by radically oriented Irish and English printers. In so doing, the chapter shows that British sentimentalism\u27s political alignments were shaped by the formats of its major texts as much as changing political contexts. Chapter 3 argues that the Crown\u27s refusal to prosecute quarto publications during the 1790s gave the format a protected status that was exploited by the era\u27s major publisher of respectably radical political literature, Joseph Johnson. By publishing the anti-monarchical poems of Blake, Barlow, Wordsworth, and Coleridge in quarto, Johnson curbed their seditious tendencies and configured them as liberal works whose textual appeals to middle-class audiences were reinforced by their bibliographic format. Chapter 4 examines William Wordsworth\u27s use of the quarto format to publish his career-defining poem The Excursion, arguing that the poem\u27s quarto publication was not only intended to mitigate Wordsworth\u27s anxieties of influence or declare his newly Royalist political alliance but that it also succeeded in classing the poem\u27s aesthetic ideology for many Regency readers. Chapter 5 investigates the quarto\u27s role in stoking British fears about oriental luxury: by showing how the reception of Regency-period oriental verse quartos like Robert Southey\u27s The Curse of Kehama and Thomas Moore\u27s Lalla Rookh displayed the luxurious bibliographic contours of Romantic-period orientalism, the chapter demonstrates that those anxieties of empire unsettling Romantic writers were also triggered by the expensive quarto book