Proposed law to stop items for men and women from being priced differently

bbc.co.uk

5 points·bloak··4 comments

This is dumb, because price controls are dumb. The items are not the same. And if they are, why would women not simply buy men's items, if they think they are cheaper?

Do economists have any explanations for why the market doesn't do the right thing here and regulation might be necessary?

The market doesn't optimize for fairness, but for profit. If they can sell a product to women for more money if you color it in pink and write "Lady" on the packaging, they will (if those really are the only differences as suggested in the article). It's similar to that story where travel sites charged more if they identified people as Mac users - because they can.

There's no shortage of plausible explanations but I would like to know what's really happening. I wonder if some of the vendors have confidential internal reports that explain what's going on.

Perhaps a significant proportion of women don't even look at the price, thereby encouraging shops to concentrate on exploiting those people rather than providing good-value products for the rest of the population. If that's the case, why does that group exist and why is it female? Is it because they are innumerate? Or because they're spending someone else's money? It's all just speculation until someone provides some evidence.

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