The Pappy Pricing Puzzle

Jeremy Horpedahl2 Comments

If you drink bourbon whiskey (or even if you don’t) you’ve probably heard of Pappy Van Winkle. Bourbon has experienced something of a revival in the past two decades, after being in decline for much of the 20th century. As part of this revival, some bourbons have become very highly sought after by the nouveau bourbon enthusiasts. And the various offerings of Pappy Van Winkle are arguably the most highly sought after. Finding Pappy is almost impossible these days, though this was also true a decade ago so it’s not really a “new” phenomena.

So here’s the “puzzle” for economists: why aren’t Pappy and other rare whiskies sold at market prices? No one in the “legal” market seems willing to do so. I put “legal” in quotation marks because there is a robust secondary market for these bottles, and the legal status of these sales is entirely unclear to me as an economist (alcohol markets are, to say the least, highly regulated).

In these secondary markets, it is not unusual for a 20-year bottle of Pappy Van Winkle to sell for $2,000. The “manufacturer’s suggested retail price” is $199.99. But you will never find this bottle on the shelf for that price. The bottles are held by retailers, either to sell to friends, auction off for charity, or conduct a lottery for the right to purchase the bottle at well below market prices.

So why doesn’t the distillery raise the MSRP? Clearly, they do this from time to time. Ten years ago, if you were lucky enough to find this bottle it was around $100 (I was lucky enough, on occasion). Clearly, they recognize that prices can increase. And that’s not just “keeping up with inflation”: $100 in 2011 is about $120 in current dollars. By 2016, they had raised the MSRP to $169.99. But why doesn’t the distillery raise the price more, perhaps all the way up to the market clearing price? By doing so, they would, perhaps, be able to ramp up production so that in 2041 there might be a lot more Pappy on the shelf. At the very least, they could dramatically increase their profit.

Receipt for 1 bottle of 20-year Pappy and 2 bottles of 12-year Van Winkle “Special Reserve” from 2011.

Also, why don’t retailers just put bottles on the shelf at $2,000? Stores occasionally do this, but mostly because they are fed up with all of the customers calling about rare bottles. Sometimes they will price it even higher than secondary markets. But usually, they allocate the bottles by something other than the price mechanism. Why? Businesses don’t usually leave dollar bills, especially $1,000 dollar bills, on the table.

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Was “World War II” Just a Myth?

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

May 5, 2415

[To:] Mark Livingstone,

25 The Standards,

Verneville, Alassippi

Dear Mark:
in your last letter you made one palpable hit, but only one: I admit that the atomic wars of the Twenty-first Century and the cataclysms of the Twenty-second Century destroyed so much of our cultural inheritance, including nearly all our Nineteenth and Twentieth Century history, that there is very little we can turn to of those times that is authentic. Apparently that is the only point we will be able to agree on.

I cannot possibly believe, for instance, as you do, that there ever did exist an Abraham Lincoln as so glowingly portrayed by our two or three surviving “history” digests; nor can I believe there ever was a World War II, at least such as they described. Wars, yes – there have always been wars, and a World War II may have occurred – but certainly not with such incredible concomitants.

In short, your history is much too fictional for me.

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Active empathy makes for better research

mdmakowskyLeave a comment

There are skills necessary for good research and policy design, but not all of them can be taught. One of the skills I advocate that my students develop, but to be honest I’m not sure if I’m all that convincing, is active empathy i.e. to willfully try to place yourselves in the context that is driving the model underlying your research question and imagine how you would behave. This is, perhaps, more work than it sounds.

Trying to imagine how you would behave in a given decision context requires not just imagining how you would make the best possible decision, but what you might actually do. This means imagining your own hypothetical state of mind in the model event context. How tired you might be, how frustrated or bored or scared. How invested you are cognitively or how distracted from the entire enterprise. Would you even be conscious of the decision in the moment you were making it, or would you only realize it upon later reflection?

What would your resource constraints be and what would it feel like to live under those constraints? What sort of rewards or punishments are you considering? This is where it pays to be honest with both your current and hypothetical selves. If you’re a car salesman, are you more excited about making the most money or being the best salesperson in the lot? If you’re a cop, are you more excited about making a big arrest or making it through the day with the minimum of interactions? Do you care more about your boss liking you or your fellow street officers?

This also, more often than not, means imaging you are a completely different person. This is where it is strongly advisable to practice not just active empathy, but active humility. I like to think I am pretty good at putting myself in other people’s shoes, but I also know I will never be able to fully empathize with the experience of being a woman in an abusive domestic context with two young children during a global pandemic. What I can do, however, is start by actively empathizing with the elements of that context that are accessible to me and my life experience, and then do my best to add into the exercise the different constraints, outside options, and resources available that might change the decisions made. I can enrich the mental model I am building by trying to appreciate what it means to make decisions, in any context, under the duress of physical fear and heightened uncertainty, while all the while acknowledging my exercise is inherently limited by my own experience.

Having invested real time and energy in this exercise, you’ll be in a better place to guide your research and policy design, not just because you’re thinking about the problem from the ground level, but because you’ve forced yourself to acknowledge where your blind spots are, and can do your best to address them. First person narrative accounts (“anecdotes”) don’t usually make for great data, but they are great way to let someone else’s experience to partially (but never fully) fill in your gaps. To be clear, I don’t view this as an alternative to standard rational choice frameworks of analysis. Quite the contrary, I think it exactly when the choices being made by others seem entirely irrational that it is most advisable to step back and try to actively empathize with the decisionmaker– to try to see the choices, constraints, and other players in the game as they actually see them. It’s amazing what can quickly become completely rational once you consider in resource constraints, especially information constraints, people are operating within.

If it sounds like I’m trying to convince economists everywhere of the merits of Method Acting, don’t worry, I’m not.

No, scratch that. That’s exactly what I’m doing. Just keep your rehearsals to yourself.

Write Repeat

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

We at EWED hope that we are creating quality ungated content to make the world a better place. This blog is also a commitment device to write more.

Everyone expects that the only way to get better at running is to run. Not everyone realizes that writing more makes you a better writer.

As a reminder for myself to write, I created an EWED design line in the same store that I posted about yesterday.

Black T-Shirt

Tote bag for all your pens and notebooks.

There a a few other styles and iterations at the store.

The Epsilon Delta Sorority

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

When I was a first-year graduate student in an economics Ph.D. program, I was taking a class we called Math Econ (taught by Dr. Omar Al-Ubaydli, at the time). I also was lucky to be renting a house along with several other women in the same program. For a few weeks, our group study sessions featured epsilon and delta.

Like many aspiring economists, I had taken Real Analysis at my undergraduate institution to bulk up on math skill and impress the admissions committee.*  

I never had a chance to join a sorority as an undergraduate student. It does look fun to walk around wearing a Greek code that is only fully understood by other members of a club. So, in grad school, I wanted to make shirts for what I called our “epsilon delta sorority”. We had Greek letters and a sisterhood (brotherhood). There are lots of women and men who are in the epsilon delta sorority.

It only took a decade for me to realize my dream. I have created shirts and shipped them to the girls I lived with. So more people can join, I created a store: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/economist-writing-every-day/

Here’s me wearing a t-shirt for women

Here’s a version for men

We have accessories, too. Why not? Life is too short to not put this on a mug. Someone already told me they want to give this to their daughter, so I added kids’ sizes.

I pulled out an old paper from my Math Econ course binder for this post. Here is something I had written for the class:

*If you are looking for an introduction, try Khan Academy. Taking Real Analysis before you get to an economics Ph.D. program is helpful, although not always necessary. Multivariable calculus is more practical than Real Analysis and used on a more routine basis for economists. Some subfields require more formal proofs than others.

Hyperinflationary Efficiency?

Zachary BartschLeave a comment

I’m advising a senior thesis for a student who is examining the strength of Purchasing Power Parity in hyper-inflationary countries. Beautifully, the results are consistent with another author* who uses a more sophisticated method.

For those who don’t know, absolute purchasing power parity (PPP) depends on arbitrage among traders to cause a unit of currency to have the same ability to acquire goods in two different countries. If after converting your currency you can afford more stuff in foreign country, then there is a profit opportunity to purchase there and even to re-sell it in your home country.

Essentially, when you make that decision, you are reducing demand for the good in your home country and increasing demand in the foreign country (re-selling affects the domestic supply too). Eventually, the changes in demand cause the prices to converge and the arbitrage opportunities disappear. At this point the two currencies are said to have purchasing power parity – it doesn’t matter where you purchase the good.

So does PPP hold? One way that economists measure the strength of PPP is by measuring the time that it takes for a typical purchasing power difference to be arbitraged away by 50% – its ‘half-life’.  The more time that is required, the less efficient the markets are said to be.

The ex-ante question is: Is PPP be stronger or weaker during hyperinflationary periods?

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Are Poor Americans Really as Rich as Average Canadians?

Jeremy Horpedahl3 Comments

Have you seen this chart? I certainly have. It floats around on social media a lot. The chart seems to indicate that poor Americans are better off than the average person in most other rich countries. Roughly equal to Canada and France, and better off than Denmark or New Zealand.

When I’ve asked for sources in the past, people usually aren’t sure. They remember downloading it from somewhere, but they can’t recall where.

But I think I found the source: it’s this article from JustFacts. After seeing how they calculated it, I’m skeptical that it provides a good comparison of poor Americans to other countries.

Here’s what the chart does. For most countries, it uses a World Bank measure of consumption per capita. They then convert that to US dollars using PPP adjustments. For the poor in the US, they use a consumption estimate for the bottom 20% of households (Table 6), and then divide by the average number of people per household. For the poor in the US, the average consumption for 2010 was an amazing $57,049, more than double the poverty line! That’s about $21,000 per poor person.

How is this possible?

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The Top Shot Blockchain Phenomenon

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

Samford Business student Wes Crane writes: Remember when people used to buy and sell physical sports trading cards? Recently the NBA has partnered with Dapper Labs, a company that specializes in blockchain (the same technology used for Bitcoin and Ethereum), to create and sell a digital art form of non-fungible tokens, or “NFT”s, that contain video clips of highlight moments which can be traded online at https://nbatopshot.com.

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I could do better

mdmakowskyLeave a comment

My favorite soccer team has been badly coached for 2 years and I am regularly convinced I could do better.

These are not the thoughts of a rational man and its causing me no small amount of consternation, bordering on intellectual crisis. Which is, of course, a lie, but adding a touch of intellectual melodrama never hurts when you’re trying your damnedest to write something new every week.

It is a puzzle, to be sure. There have been two coaches in the last two years, the second having only been there a week. The first was experienced, accomplished, and internationally famous. I’m quite confident he was wrong in the majority of decisions he made, but I at least had a model for why he was so often wrong.

When an ostensible expert appears to be failing at their job far worse than a hypothetically cheaper replacement, I always look for the rational reason why someone might be choosing to fail. In this case, we were observing an individual who could achieve mediocrity without effort. His past accomplishments gave him credibility with the players and his stock of knowledge as of 2011 was sufficient to carry him to large pay checks. To achieve mediocrity required near minimal effort. Could he update his tactics, both within the structure of the game and his management of personnel? Of course. But doing so would require enormous amounts of effort. His salary had peaked, his future managerial prospects dimmed by age and recent results, and as such the returns to effort were dwarfed by the returns to leisure. Allow me to enter ego into the calculus. What sounds more cognitively costly: acquiescing to reality that your human capital has been rendered obsolete and rebuilding your modus operandi from scratch with the full knowledge that you may spend your wealth-laden golden years failing in public? Or denying it fully, shifting all blame for failure onto the personnel, and bemoaning that it is not your human capital that is obsolete, but rather that the labor pool available to you is fundamentally flawed? To me its a no-brainer, and it’s why I am fully of the belief that there actually are bloggers in their mom‘s basement who could have better managed a team.

The new manager is a temp. He’s never managed a team before. Then again, neither have I. He has, however, played professional soccer at the highest level. He has been placed on the management training track by a world-class organization. He has none of the maladapted human capital or rational-addiction-adjacent reasons to fail at his job. He has all of the local and tacit knowledge from being on the training pitch and in the locker room that I don’t.

I’m still confident I could have done a better job than he did today. Why is that?

I can construct a model to rationalize my beliefs, but that model gets awfully “just-so” very quickly. It relies on assumptions I can’t justify and broad generalizations that, if evenly applied, would hurt the case for myself as superior even more so than the current job holder. Of course, I can invent a narrative where I am the superior sports team manager, but that narrative would have to rewrite my entire personal history going back so far as to render me a completely differ human, and one who no doubt would have just as many (and possibly the same) blind spots.

I guess what I’m saying is that I know I shouldn’t be the manager. Every rational bone in my body knows that is a silly idea and I would fail miserably. But I think there is a case to be made that sometimes we can look at the person making decisions for our favorite team, look at their track record, and confidently say “They would be making better decisions if they talked it over with me.” When the armchair quarterback says ‘the coach is an idiot” they’re not saying they want to be the coach. They’re saying they want to be in the room. They want a voice because they think they could contribute.

Someone tell Tottenham Hotspur that I’m available. I’m not free, but I can be had.

Current Research on the Gig Economy – Palagashvili

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

Online platforms are allowing us to trade used goods more easily than before. Similarly, sites like UpWork and Uber are making it easier to trade small blocks of human labor. Since the gig economy is growing (as documented by Dimitri Koustas), it’s important to understand how it is affecting workers.

Liya Palagashvili of Mercatus has a working paper with Paoula Suarez “Women as Independent Workers in the Gig Economy” examining particularly how the growing opportunities to work on a gig basis has affected women in different ways than men. They note, for example, that (in 2014–2015) 87 percent of independent workers on the Etsy platform were female, while 14 percent of workers on Uber’s platform were female.

Abstract: New technologies and digital platforms have ushered in a rise of gig, freelance, contract, and other types of independent work. Although independent workers and the gig economy as a whole have received plenty of attention, little research has examined the heterogeneity of work characteristics among different independent work opportunities, specifically as it relates to the participation of women in this workforce. Existing data indicate that some digital platforms are more male dominated, whereas others are more female dominated. What accounts for these differences? In this paper, we empirically examine the heterogeneity of work within independent work opportunities in relation to female participation by analyzing work characteristics in the United States from the Occupational Information Network (O*Net) database that reflect greater temporal flexibility, which has been shown to vary across occupations and to attract more female workers. Our findings suggest that women in the independent work context do self-select into the types of independent work jobs that reflect greater temporal flexibility, as is the case for women working in traditional employment. However, our findings also reveal that the way in which the existing literature measures temporal flexibility in traditional work settings may not be the same as the way it is measured in the context of independent work. We discuss the implications of our findings for public policy and labor laws. (emphasis mine)