> The technical economic term for this collusion is probably something like 'efficient market price'
That's definitely untrue. I mean, clearly an order book shows many sellers with different opinions about what a fair price is, but it would seem reasonable that the price in between the bid and the ask is a close approximation of the efficient market price.
> Collusion can't mean that the sellers all have an implicitly coordinated price, because the market is always going to settle on an implicitly coordinated price if conditions aren't changing.
That's also pretty untrue, or so pedantic as to be meaningless. Clearly when orders are fulfilled on a proper bid/ask market, conditions aren't changing in any fundamental sense but the price definitely does.
You're really stuck applying Econ 101 in one of the worst places, retail. Your line of thinking has been completely co-opted by a very specific kind of consumption--buying all your things from the same few stores--where producers benefit from collusion, meaning coordinating pricing, at the zero-sum expense of consumers.
Ordinary consumers could buy their goods at auction, or from artisans, or in pre-sales. Those are much better examples of situations where secular trends could sometimes show the symptoms of collusion without actual collusion. But sellers on Amazon? C'mon man, sellers coordinate prices via implicit information exchange on Amazon in a way that, if they were allowed to, they would just collude straightforwardly to do so.
I think he meant Efficient Market Hypothesis, which could be posed as a strategy.
> That's also pretty untrue, or so pedantic as to be meaningless.
It's still collusion.
> You're really stuck applying Econ 101 in one of the worst places, retail.
This is Game Theory, not Econ 101. I also think it's one of the best places.
> But sellers on Amazon? C'mon man, sellers coordinate prices via implicit information exchange on Amazon in a way that, if they were allowed to, they would just collude straightforwardly to do so.
I've seen it happen. I've even seen collusion with online reviews on there.
That's definitely untrue. I mean, clearly an order book shows many sellers with different opinions about what a fair price is, but it would seem reasonable that the price in between the bid and the ask is a close approximation of the efficient market price.
> Collusion can't mean that the sellers all have an implicitly coordinated price, because the market is always going to settle on an implicitly coordinated price if conditions aren't changing.
That's also pretty untrue, or so pedantic as to be meaningless. Clearly when orders are fulfilled on a proper bid/ask market, conditions aren't changing in any fundamental sense but the price definitely does.
You're really stuck applying Econ 101 in one of the worst places, retail. Your line of thinking has been completely co-opted by a very specific kind of consumption--buying all your things from the same few stores--where producers benefit from collusion, meaning coordinating pricing, at the zero-sum expense of consumers.
Ordinary consumers could buy their goods at auction, or from artisans, or in pre-sales. Those are much better examples of situations where secular trends could sometimes show the symptoms of collusion without actual collusion. But sellers on Amazon? C'mon man, sellers coordinate prices via implicit information exchange on Amazon in a way that, if they were allowed to, they would just collude straightforwardly to do so.