{"id":4663,"date":"2011-04-01T03:07:23","date_gmt":"2011-04-01T11:07:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=4663"},"modified":"2021-09-06T22:44:44","modified_gmt":"2021-09-07T05:44:44","slug":"comparison-shopping-for-the-unaffordable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=4663","title":{"rendered":"Comparison Shopping for the Unaffordable"},"content":{"rendered":"

To address a small issue in the history of economic thought, I wanted to consult a copy of the first<\/em> edition of The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior<\/cite>, by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. I didn't find it reliably quoted on-line, nor did I find it listed in the on-line library catalogue for USD<\/abbr><\/a> nor in that for UCSD<\/abbr><\/a>. So I thought that perhaps I'd buy a copy.<\/p> I consulted the Used and Out-of-Print listings of AddAll<\/a>, and quickly concluded that, no, perhaps I won't<\/em> buy a copy. \"[detail The lowest<\/em> price that I found was four thousand<\/em>, nine hundred and fifty-nine dollars, and twenty-nine cents.

I'm not sure who would pay that much, but the next lowest seller<\/a> wants seven<\/em> thousand, five hundred and ninety-one dollars, and ninety-three cents.<\/p>

Another remarkable thing is the range<\/em> of prices being asked for just that next seller<\/a>. \"[detail<\/a> Through Biblio.com<\/a> and through Biblio.co.uk<\/a>, the price would be that $7591.93. From that same seller<\/a>, but through Find-a-Book<\/a> (listed by AddAll<\/a> as ilabdatabase.com<\/q>), the price would be $7614.96. And through AbeBooks<\/a> (whom I encourage you to avoid in any case<\/a>), the book would be $7867.54, still from that same seller. There's a $275.61 range here, determined by which intermediate service one uses.<\/p>

Now, even as I was writing this entry, some of these prices were changing; that's because the seller<\/a> is based in London, and the exchange rate<\/em> has been in flux. And that suggests that part of the price range may be explained by different methods being used to calculate a rate of exchange. $275.61 may not seem a trivial sum, but it's only about 3.63% of $7591.93.<\/p>

Addendum<\/span> (2019:09\/30):<\/span> This morning I returned to the aforementioned small issue in the history of economic thought, and discovered that in the time since I posted this entry Google Books<\/a> came to provide what they call a snippet view<\/q> of a scan of the first edition, which view was enough to answer my question. I wish that I'd had that answer when writing my paper on indecision; but at least I have it as I write my paper synthesizing a theory of decision-making in which preörderings both for preferences and for probabilities may be incomplete.<\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To address a small issue in the history of economic thought, I wanted to consult a copy of the first edition of The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. I didn't find it reliably quoted on-line, nor did I find it listed in the on-line library catalogue for […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,5,4],"tags":[869,870,871,872,979,981,980,304,1330,426,519],"class_list":["post-4663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-personal","category-public","tag-abebooks","tag-abebooks-com","tag-addall","tag-addall-com","tag-biblio","tag-biblio-co-uk","tag-biblio-com","tag-books","tag-economics","tag-exchange-rates","tag-international-trade"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4663"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11817,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4663\/revisions\/11817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}