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Old 07-05-2007, 04:35 PM
pvn pvn is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: back despite popular demand
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Default Re: Why aren\'t there more private roads?

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You haven't really understood the logic of maximisation of profit in this regard,

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No, I understand it, it's just that your example didn't actually show what you claimed it would show (you didn't pull enough numbers out of your ass) and on top of that, $$$ is not the highest goal in my book.

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Scenario 1: Demand is in place from A to B, some drivers are willing to pay $500/passing, some $180, some $40, some $20 etc.. Company A builds a road. The company owning the road conducts a calculation, they i.e. put the price at $100/passing. Letting the 1,000 John Smiths that is willing to pay $90/passing drive will give them $90k more but they will lose more than $90k from the drivers that are willing to pay $100+ by lowering the price.

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Possibly, but you didn't show that. We don't know how many are currently using the road. Also, we don't know what the capacity is.

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Then the bosses at company B sits down to consider if they should build a new road. Then they conduct a revenue analysis of the situation which will occur if they build a 2nd road:
Scenario 2 (two roads in place): Company A will start at $100. company B will then offer a price of $90, all the drivers will change to road B. Company A will then lower to $80 etc.. When there are two roads they will keep underbidding eachother as the most expensive one won't have customers and thus will not consider the loss of profit from the customers willing to pay high prices like $500/passing. At one point total revenue will be lower than the total cost of building the 2 roads. But it won't stop there, those are sunk cost, they will still have an incentive to underbid eachother until they come down to maintenance price at i.e. $5/passing.

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You're just repeating yourself.

There's no reason the price for both roads has to go to "maintenance price". You've neglected that a road has a certain capacity. And the bigger the road, the higher that mainenance price will be. On the other hand, the smaller the road, the fewer cars it can handle, and the more unmet capacity will be available no matter *how low* the price of the first road is. You can probably pull a few more numbers out of your ass here.

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So the investment manager at the 2nd company, concludes that all the investment will be lost if they build a second road.

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Then disney figures out they can build their own road, let their customers use it for free, and nobody uses road A, disney gets a bunch of happy customers.

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So to conclude, for different products there will be different alternatives that will be best for the economy. For most it will be non-intervention, but for certain ones intervention will lead to a net benefit to the economy as a whole.

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Right, now all you have to do is invent the "benefit measuring machine" that reads everyone's minds, calculates their utility, and figures out how to add those across people. There's probably a nobel prize in it somewhere.
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