Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies: And Other Pricing Puzzles [Paperback]

This entertaining book seeks to unravel an array of pricing puzzles from the one captured in the books title to why so many prices end with 9 (as in $2.99 or $179). Along the way, the author explains how the 9/11 terrorists have, through the effects of their heinous acts on the relative prices of various modes of travel, killed more Americans since 9/11 than they killed that fateful day. He also explains how well-meaning efforts to spur the use of alternative, supposedly environmentally friendly fuels have starved millions of people around the world and given rise to the deforestation of rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia.

This book unravels an array of pricing puzzles from the one captured in the books title as to why so many prices end with 9 . UCI economist Richard McKenzie gets across why prices matter. His book is enthralling, entertaining, and yet at a high scientific level.

How Prices Matter rices are ubiquitous, so much so that their importance to the smooth operation of a market economy (even one constrained by extensive polit- P ical controls as is the case in China) can go unnoticed and unheralded. Prices are what all trades, whether at the local mall or across the globe, are built around. Tey facilitate trades among buyers and sellers who dont know each other, meaning they make less costly, or more socially benefcial, the allocation and redistribution of the planets scarce resources. Indeed, as the late Friedrich Hayek is renowned for having observed, prices summarize a vast amount of - formation on the relative scarcity and, hence, the relative cost of resources (with much of the information subjective in nature) that can be known only by ind-i viduals scattered across markets and cannot be collected in centralized loc- tions, except through market-determined prices. 1 Because they summarize, and largely hide from view of buyers, so much i- formation spread among people throughout the world, prices can be l3ã