Business

Identity violation and pricing

Business

Why do books and records have standard pricing? You’d think that a record from Miles Davis or Patricia Barber would cost more than one from the local garage band.

Economists tie themselves into knots trying to explain why wine and handbags have such wide price variation, but tickets to movies do not. They invoke “credence goods” and “focal point coordination” and “transaction utility” and “cost disease.” Darby, Karni, Schelling, Baumol, Thaler—a parade of Nobel-adjacent thinkers building elegant models to explain what’s sitting right in front of them.

It’s simpler than that, I think. People don’t go into publishing or music to make a profit (not most of them, not the smart ones). They do it to create culture and to be part of a culture. They’re not going to brag about making a lot of money, they’ll brag about finding art or sharing it.

Meanwhile, down the street at the hedge fund, the entire point is to find and capture price differences. Leaving money on the table isn’t just a missed opportunity—it’s an embarrassment. It means you weren’t paying attention.

The pricing norms in any industry reflect the identity of the people who built it.

Hermès could auction Birkin bags and make more money. They don’t, because scarcity-through-restraint is the elegant move, the identity-consistent move. It’s what people like them do.

Movie theaters were built by showmen who inherited vaudeville instincts: pack the house, give ’em a show, make it up on popcorn. Uniform ticket pricing isn’t economically optimal. It’s simply what people like us have always done.

This explains why industries are so stable—and why disruption feels like betrayal.

When concert tickets went dynamic, the backlash wasn’t about economics. It was moral outrage. Artists who adopted surge pricing weren’t just changing strategy; they were declaring themselves to be a different kind of person. The fans noticed.

Amazon didn’t share publishing’s allergy to profit. Ticketmaster didn’t share the old promoter’s loyalty to fans. They weren’t optimizing within the culture—they were violating it.

The price variation in any market reflects not what the market will bear, but what the people in that market can bear to charge.

The economists will keep building models. But if you want to understand why things cost what they cost, don’t ask what’s efficient. Ask what kind of person would be embarrassed to charge more. Or embarrassed not to.

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