Does Homo economicus really exist? And even if it did, the ends optimized for are chosen subjectively, aren't they? If the aliens' goal is to possess the original fsvo original, that's their business. Just as it is the vendor's business to set the price of the original at $Y at a price of $X.
AFAICT you introduce "... as a bundle of atoms ..." here. Are you proposing that rather that to "actually ship" original or copy, rather than packaging up the original carefully to keep it intact on its journey, you ship a dust that the buyer can reassemble, IKEA-style ("Interstellar Kamprad")? (Even still, they may decide that destroying the original in this way is worth the price premium you're demanding above destroying the atomically-identical copy; who's to say?)
Finally, there is some circularity in you asking $X rather than $Y, Y >> X in this case -- if you don't see the difference yourself, why would you have priced them so differently, instead of charging either $X for both or $Y for both, and then randomly choosing to send the copy or the original at that price? For instance, "Because that is the price they are willing to pay? Because that is the price the market will bear?" involve some assumptions about your a priori market knowledge.
Not here. Not yet. But maybe somewhere.
But even here, no one pays a premium for "the original" of a digital image. Originals command a premium only in the absence of technology to make perfect copies.
He has an interesting wikipedia page. I can't for the life of me figure out why his campaign paid Krugman for this paper. Perhaps he gave the campaign (and it's anti-space-exploration platform) something they weren't expecting, and they had paid in advance. :-) More likely it was Krugman making a joke. There are several others in the paper.
Krugman's paper is interesting in arguing whose clock should be used for the calculation of compound interest and makes the perfectly reasonable argument that if a common frame of reference between the planet-bound sender and receiver is avaialble, that should be used, otherwise the receiver's (and certainly not a relativistically moving transport vessel). There's really not that much physics in it, which he cheerfully admits.
He also argues that the interest rates of the trading parties would equalize with trade. Again, perfectly plausible (and, it turns out, in the intervening decades that has essentially happened on Earth). He does have a relativistic take on this, though, doing roughly a Lorentz transform on interest rates. Maybe it partially anticipated the investment into low-latency/high-frequency trading that has been popular recently?
Really? And here I was thinking that the original paper was meant to be taken seriously. (Who is William Proxmire anyway?)
> for your argument you want to replace it with an identical atom -- no swapping of isotopes etc. -- and in an identical state with respect to its neighbours.
That's right, to the limits of what is measurable anyway.
> the knowledge of the technology and its utility in forging art is unknown to to the aliens
No, I'm assuming the aliens have this technology. So they have a choice: they can receive a scan of the original, from which they can construct an indistinguishable copy, for $X, or they can receive "the original" sent to them as a bundle of atoms for $Y, with Y>>X. There is no deception involved. My claim is simply that if the aliens have any sense at all they will choose the first option.