Governments will also exert this force on behalf of their citizens, is the happier read. In a disaster, everything becomes finite, but profiteering is still deeply disruptive to the shared societal fabric.

Yep - if there's N capacity to provide a necessary necessary good/service, but M > N need, raising the price doesn't seem like a great solution to manage it in a crisis situation. To some extent non necessary uses would decrease, but you also end up with more wealthy people who want it more getting it, and more generally there won't be any distinction between want and need.

> if there's N capacity to provide a necessary necessary good/service, but M > N need, raising the price doesn't seem like a great solution to manage it in a crisis situation

Within a crisis, yes. But this also did-incentivises overprovisioning, i.e. building slack into the system.

Not speaking in general terms, but just for cloud services—it’s just bananas expensive to overprovision at a cloud provider.

The more profitable (and ecological) way to run a cloud provider is to provision only for the capacity that you need, and then pack your machines with low-priority tasks with lower guarantees where you can simply start load-shedding in a crisis.

There are thousands of businesses that will look at EC2 spot pricing and simply not schedule their jobs above a certain price point, and I’m sure all the cloud providers have internal workloads running at lower priority (e.g. transcoding YouTube meme compilations) that will run at reduced capacity. Personally I think the whole thing is kind of elegant, even if there are a lot of rough edges in practice.

Just like outside a crisis situation.

Possibly, but in a crisis situation it is quite a bit more important to deliver adequate service to the "need" group. Outside of a crisis, the "need" group can pursue less expensive alternatives at their leisure. Right now, "fast" is critical.

And outside of a crisis situation demand patterns change much more gradually - long enough for manufacturers to ramp up production, more competitors to emerge etc. The normal feedback loops that make core goods available to the masses don't have time to happen right now.

Precisely. It seems like most manufacturing & supply chains have some elasticity for increased demand, e.g., toilet paper manufacturers were able to increase production either 10% or 20% very quickly (I forget which), but after going all out with 24 hour shifts, you can't do much more in the short term. Also, the more companies that have to do this, the more likely there will be correlated supply chains that feed those companies their raw materials, meaning the issue contaminates the supply & logistics process one more link up the chain.

Why do you think governments would only sue on behalf of themselves? The point of these laws is to allow attorneys general to sue on behalf of their constituents. Random example: https://www.standardspeaker.com/coronavirus/state-attorney-g...

Almost all emergency-related profiteering is about non-artificial supply and demand issues. Grocery chains charging 10x as much for water or toilet paper is exactly the kind of thing these laws are meant to prevent.

(If the shortage is long-term, you'll usually want to implement a rationing system to address the shortages, but in the short term this kind of fiat can work.)

Ignoring the implementation issues, my issue is when the vendor profits of limited supply in a crisis.

If the supplier is only passing on their own increased costs then that's at least fair in principle. Similarly, marginal increases in price for marginal increases in use also seems fair when there are demand surges.

The additional dimension is time-smoothing. Emergency declarations that solely serve to smooth over a few weeks spike can be effective. There does not appear to be a predictive estimator whether emergency declarations will be appropriately time limited.

my father , a Depression Era banker, observed : "who asks How Much is fine but the man who asks When you are paying him is finished."

Government has to smooth time.

>>I don’t know how I feel about this.

Your feelings aside it is probably illegal as this is an emergency, and MSFT's PR would take a major, major beating.

So MS is probably hiring by the thousands trying to meet demand. You raise prices when a hurricane or a pandemic hits, if you don't want to be around for a long time.

I find price gouging to be perfectly normal and perhaps even desirable during times like these. If the toilet paper prices go up drastically people will not be able to hoard it the way they are doing today.

People will still be able to hoard things. The difference is that only the rich will hoard, because everybody else never got the chance.

The normal market logic that high prices encourage extra production doesn't apply during an emergency, when the demand is panic-induced and momentary, and supply changes won't take effect until after the emergency is over.

The actual solution that makes sure everyone gets what they need and theres no hoarding is rationing: limit the number that one person can buy. And that's exactly what most grocery stores are doing.

How is rationing working? supply is still not enough and rationing on that basis still doesn't prevent the "rich" from effectively paying straw purchasers to buy the goods they want to hoard. Hell, it doesn't even prevent people from repeatedly making visits to collect whatever is on the shelves.

I'm not convinced the US government, let alone any western government, has the plan, manpower or infrastructure in place to actually take over distribution of essentials in fair quantities.

What do you mean? Rationing is working fine in the stores that are implementing it, the problem is that so many stores aren't. My local grocery is rationing paper products, milk, chicken, and eggs, and they're always available if you visit before noon.

There is no supply problem for consumer products. The shortages you see at grocery stores are exclusively because of panic-buying and hoarding, the shelves are stocked right back up to full overnight.

variable pricing for volume - reverse discounts, in effect - might have worked well.

buying 1 pack of TP? $2. 2 packs? $5. 3 packs? $12. etc.

The people that truly need 1 or 2 can afford those. The people that want to buy 10 or 20 at a time will pay a huge premium, enough such that it won't really even be easy for them to turn a profit trying to resell to the people who got there 10 minutes after them.

Ability to pay is only one aspect of demand. There’s also how much you actually want it, and the amount of opportunity cost you’re willing to pay. Keeping prices artificially low keeps demand artificially high, while supply doesn’t increase, or cannot increase if it’s inelastic.

> There’s also how much you actually want it, and the amount of opportunity cost you’re willing to pay.

Money doesn't have much relation to opportunity cost in the presence of enormous wealth inequality. An unemployed person willing to pay their entire bank account of $100 for some good clearly wants it more than a work-from-home tech worker willing to pay the $600 they made yesterday.

The same applies to businesses using cloud services. A struggling local business has a ludicrously low cap on what they can pay for Teams compared to Walmart or something.

You've just described how a monetary system works and have not refuted the link between prices and opportunity cost.

The unemployed person in my scenario is willing to forgo the opportunity to buy food, pay rent, or buy literally anything else. The tech worker is paying a negligible opportunity cost, as they have tens of thousands in their checking account and paying $600 has no effect on their ability to purchase food, rent, or anything else they want.

If I as the merchant believe the amount of money someone is willing to pay is equivalent to the opportunity cost they're willing to incur, I have to assume the person offering $600 wants it more.

I'm not sure "opportunity cost" is the correct term for what the OP wanted to say, since it usually refers to the (theoretical) loss incurred by choosing one alternative over another. The point is simply that a consumer's ability to pay is not necessarily a reflection of their need of the product. That's not an argument to blithely decouple pricing from supply and demand, but it's a recognition of a problem that a market-based society needs to deal with under extraordinary conditions.

Opportunity cost is everything you choose to forgo when you choose to allocate any resources to anything. If supply and demand is allowed to have its normal influence on price, then you can decide what you actually have the most demand for, and allocate your resources accordingly. The decisions you make regarding your own needs are always going to be much more efficient than those that any rationing authority could ever make.

That presumes the outdated notion of perfectly rational consumers. Economists have discovered that consumers aren't rational anyway, but in the case of a pandemic the likes of which western consumers have never seen, I can assure you that consumers are anxious. Some consumers are even panic buying, and their purchasing habits are consequently even more irrational than usual. Even assuming you and I both manage to stay rational, other customers hoarding will affect our respective purchasing powers. (Tbh I'm not immune to group psychology which means panic buying.)

When a hoarder has a 5 years stockpile of TP and others have none, that's obviously inefficiently allocated in a time of need. Given that we've seen that the is market unable to handle panic buying and hoarding in (perceived) emergencies, strict allocation of certain necessities during an emergency really does seem like the easiest way to equitably handle the situation. More creative solutions may exist, like volume purchase surcharges, as seen in a Danish store [1], but by and large, "limit 1 per customer" seems entirely reasonable. (For whatever value of 1 is appropriate for a particular product.)

[1] https://nypost.com/2020/03/21/danish-store-instills-pricing-...

But you’re not describing an irrational actor. If the entire global economy collapsed (which is not an irrational fear to have), then having several months supply of non-perishable food, cleaning and hygiene supplies would be very valuable thing. What makes that either rational or irrational is the expense you went to purchase them. If prices are not allowed to rise to equilibrium, then that expense is going to be very minimal.

As I’ve said several times. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ration certain staples, and essential services. Everything else should just be priced to supply and demand. It’s not reasonable to call something price gouging if there are actually shortages.

(1) That is not the definition of "opportunity cost" that economists commonly use.

(2) As I often see when people make the case you're making, you are making unwarranted assumptions about the rationality of buyers. If people are fleeing a hurricane and the gas station raises the price sharply because of the demand, what can happen (and we've seen it happen, in fact) is that it encourages hoarding: it is now a precious commodity and those who can afford to buy it do so, denying it to others.

(3) As I also often see when people make the case you're making, you're also inserting a Big Bad Government Guy into the scenario, your "rationing authority," which people making my case aren't necessarily suggesting at all: we're suggesting that it is rational for suppliers to choose to ration goods in order to be able to meet the demand of a greater number of customers, rather than to meet only the demand of shoppers who can buy as much of [thing in short supply] as possible. Again this is what we actually see in practice, at this very moment: stores in my local area limiting the number of certain items you're able to buy at one time are not doing so because they have been ordered by the California Politburo to do so, they are doing so because on balance they can serve a greater number of customers, rather than turning away literally thousands of desperate people who couldn't "allocate their resources" as well as the guy with five Ultra Transparent Titanium Master Cards.

(1) that is the precise definition of opportunity cost. It is everything you forgo the opportunity to do whenever you choose to do anything. Whether you are choosing how to spend your money, or spend your time, or devote your attention, or expend your energy. All of those are opportunity cost decision. It also includes everything you forgo for any given decision. If you choose to buy a Ford, perhaps the opportunity cost could be that you don’t buy a Chrysler. But it could also be that you don’t eat out as often, because you have to make car payments, or that you don’t buy a PlayStation. It is all of those things. This is the definition used in the field of economics.

(2) raising prices will always reduce demand, outside of the very specific circumstances where demand is inelastic. Supply and demand is an inescapable law of economics, and subverting it will always result in failures in the supply chain. The scenario you described will also not increase hoarding, it will most certainly decrease it (whether arbitrage trading crops up is a different issue, but one that is completely unrelated to hoarding).

(3) I used the term rationing authority because it was a neutral descriptor. Anybody who acts as an authority on allocation rations is going to be creating the same inefficiencies (though you’d expect the parts of the supply chain closest to the consumers to be the least inefficient)

Most of what you’ve said has demonstrated serious misunderstandings of how the basic principles like supply and demand and opportunity cost works. Your argument that raising prices increases demand should really just be dismissed off the bat.

> The decisions you make regarding your own needs are always going to be much more efficient than those that any rationing authority could ever make.

If that were true, then hoarding wouldn't happen in the first place. You're obviously wrong here, and there's abundant evidence that consumers don't always make the best choices for themselves. Try scaling back your claims to something less absolute.

The hoarders benefit massively from hoarding. They benefit from a regulation that prevents the markets from responding to shortages and spikes in demand. They have no problem whatsoever deciding how to allocate their resources in that situation, which is the entire problem, because the market doesn’t force them to.

An individual will always, every single time, without fail, know what they need better than a 3rd party who nominates themselves to make decisions on behalf of others. If you remove market forces from the situation, and establish an authority to decide who gets rationed what, it will always impact the efficiency of those resource allocation decisions.

"An individual will always, every single time, without fail, know what they need better than a 3rd party who nominates themselves to make decisions on behalf of others"

This is completely false. Most individuals in a panic buying situation never know what they really need compared to a calm, educated and knowledgeable 3rd party. This crisis has also proved your assertion wrong - witness the mass buying of perishable foods and toilet paper.

Food that was thrown out in a weeks time into garbage and food that was denied to others because of panic buyers.

> This crisis has also proved your assertion wrong - witness the mass buying of perishable foods and toilet paper.

It hasn’t at all. For starters, non-perishable food was absolutely the first to vanish off the shelves. But that aside, buying too much has no detriment at all to the purchaser. The risk that they may not consume all of it is so incredibly minimal compared to what they’re actually worried about. This is only possible because prices are artificially constrained. Most people don’t have to face a considerable opportunity cost when buy way more food than they need.

You are clearly not reading the news.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8168489/Social-medi...

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manches...

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/coronavirus-outrage-bi...

I’d consider providing essential services to low income people disadvantaged during a crisis to be a seperate issue all together. I’d also suggest that such an issue would only apply to a narrow band of essential products and services. An unemployed person with $100 in their account isn’t going to care about how much access they have to high quality video conferencing. However, if I have the option of using a 12 person video conference for my morning standup, why wouldn’t I use it? If there was an additional cost for every video conference I wanted to have, I’d think more judiciously about when to use it. Which sounds better than the current situation of knowing that video conferencing is simply going to be unreliable and slow, regardless of how much I may need it for any particular meeting.

It doesn't matter if demand is artifial if there's a filter in place to allocate resources on a need-basis. Not matter the demand from non-need customers, they won't get it, or get less of it. The point in a crisis isn't to let markets find a natural equilibrium, which could mean it stabilizes into a state that isn't optimal to public health. On a crisis, the point is to prioritize those usages that will deal with and help lessen the crisis.

What mechanism do you plan to use to determine the severity of a need?

I've laid out a basic structure for my stance already so let me turn the question back to you: Do you feel that traditional market forces, with hoarding, panic buying, and price gouging at the same time health care providers run out of PPE, ventilators and other equipment... Do you feel the market forces are working in a way that best serves resolving this crisis and helping those in medical peril?

The basic structure of your approach is a vague idea that falls over in all sorts of ways once you attempt to put it into practice. Your comment is also conflating many different issues together. Contrary to your claim, I don’t think the general public has been rushing out to panic buy ventilators, or other heavy duty medical equipment. The government assuming an elevated level of control over the supply chain for medical PPE is also a completely different proposition to allowing Microsoft to increase the costs of video conferencing to properly scale to demand.

The phrase “panic buying” is really just a way to confound discussion about what’s really happening. There is a perfectly legitimate increase in demand, and a perfectly legitimate decrease in supply. If you wanted to stop people from hoarding, allowing market forces to respond to those changes would certainly shut it down. Any centrally enforces rationing policy is going to be far less efficient. The distinction between essential products and services, and non essential ones is also very real. You may choose that for any particular category of product or service, that the benefits in providing stability through rationing outweigh the costly efficiency trade offs. However that doesn’t obviously apply to every category of product or service under the sun.

The trade offs in efficiency are two fold. Firstly, the rationing authority has no effective way to gauge the actual needs of any person or organisation. So they will unavoidably end up allocating too much to some and not enough to others. Secondly, the market will typically respond to increased prices by increasing production. By keeping prices artificially low, you completely remove that incentive, and if the costs of production have risen (as they have), then you end up trying to manage the shortage by applying downward pressure on supply.

Finally, the issue of people not being able to afford the basic necessities of life is completely separate to that of supply and demand. There always have been and always will be people in that boat, regardless of whether there’s a global crisis taking place or not. In developed countries those people receive increased government assistance. I’ve never heard anybody seriously suggest that we should instead engage in mass price fixing to reduce the price of everything, rather than simply providing that assistance.

> prioritize those usages that will deal with and help lessen the crisis

Who is responsible for that decision? Do they become a bottleneck? Might they make mistakes? Are they susceptible to corruption? If so, it may be more wise to distribute that decision-making... via the market system.

The market system has, so far, benefited hoarders to the detriment of health care providers that need it more. Under normal circumstances, the market system would be just fine. In a crisis, something else is needed on top of normal market forces, which may still play a part for whatever resources are left after they reach those that truly need it.

As for who is responsible for that decision, it's a role the government generally fills. Can it be a bottleneck? Yes. But there are extreme bottlenecks now with hospitals already out of, or about to run out of, PPE and ventilators. Might there be mistakes? Sure, but again there are mistakes right now too, with market forces favoring those who can pay, have inside connections, etc., instead of those who need the resources. In short, the detriments you cite are a reality of any system, while their presence during a crisis can be mitigated at least a little, and help critical need be filled at least a little bit easier.

Don't let the desire for a "perfect" allocation system blind you to one that is merely "better" than what we currently have now with panic buying, hoarding, price gouging, etc.