[Adam]

Originally Posted by Ump153

I was going to dig out my notes from an Econ class, but I found this first. This is very close to what they taught at Oregon:


During and immediately after crises such as natural disasters, various parties will claim that someone is price gouging. What is price gouging, anyway? How do professional economists define it?

The answer is that there is no objective definition. Economists--who specialize in price theory and the behavior of markets and can study these things ad nauseum--have no definition for it, either. In fact, economists have avoided the term as if it were a social disease. A review of all the microeconomics textbooks on Neutral Source's bookshelf reveals that none have as much as an index entry.

A skeptic might retort that this illustrates the real-world irrelevance of economics. Neutral Source believes otherwise. Rather, the concept of price gouging is irrelevant to economics.

Wikipedia defines price gouging as:

a term of variable, but nearly always pejorative, meaning, referring to a seller's asking a price that is much higher than what is seen as 'fair' under the circumstances. In precise, legal usage, it is the name of a felony that obtains in some of the United States only during civil emergencies. In less precise usage, it can refer either to prices obtained by practices inconsistent with a competitive free market, or to windfall profits. In colloquial usage, it means simply that the speaker thinks the price too high, and it often degenerates into a term of demagoguery. Non-pejorative uses are generally in reaction to what the writer believes is an unjustified restraint on the market.

This is where I was going, thanks.