Podcasting “Managing aggregate demand”

What antitrust law tells us about the moral way to cope with demand that outstrips supply.

This week on my podcast, I read “Managing Aggregate Demand,” the fourth part in my ongoing Medium series about “amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing.”

https://doctorow.medium.com/managing-aggregate-demand-part-iv-8d2022a5125b

It’s a reflection on the economics of situations where demand outstrips supply — an issue that’s very much in the news today, thanks to covid supply shocks (and it’ll get only get worse, thanks to the climate emergency).

I draw on Ramsi Woodcock’s Iowa Law Review article “The Efficient Queue and the Case Against Dynamic Pricing,” an essay that presents a case for prohibiting ALL surge pricing as illegal under antitrust law.

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-105-issue-4/the-efficient-queue-and-the-case-against-dynamic-pricing/

And I reiterate Len Testa’s point that Disney parks have a huge advantage in prefering queues to auctions to control demand — because Disney tickets are tied to the buyer’s identity, Disney can extinguish the secondary markets that touts create in other domains.