I’d certainly nitpick the ranking, but they all fall into the general pattern of “harmless and possibly beneficial if rare, harmless if universal”. It’s related to the fundamental problem of business—average cost is generally much lower than marginal cost for a producer, and relative value to buyers differs greatly by very-hard-to-observe criteria, so maximizing profit means some form of price discrimination, where people pay different amounts—you need to sell enough expensive stuff to pay for fixed costs and get started, but then you want to get a little bit more for the cheap stuff you’ve already paid for. And you don’t care if you give some away for free in pursuit of that little extra, as long as it doesn’t cut into your high-paying customers.
At its root, this conundrum is a tension between the intuition that everyone is equal and fungible, and anything OK for one person to do, is OK for everyone to do, versus the fact that different instances of the “same” thing have different costs to provide, and different consumers have different ability and willingness to pay.
Once you notice this, you’ll see it everywhere. I’d change your “price discrimination” estimate from “there’s also some amount of” to “most of this is explainable by”.
I’d certainly nitpick the ranking, but they all fall into the general pattern of “harmless and possibly beneficial if rare, harmless if universal”. It’s related to the fundamental problem of business—average cost is generally much lower than marginal cost for a producer, and relative value to buyers differs greatly by very-hard-to-observe criteria, so maximizing profit means some form of price discrimination, where people pay different amounts—you need to sell enough expensive stuff to pay for fixed costs and get started, but then you want to get a little bit more for the cheap stuff you’ve already paid for. And you don’t care if you give some away for free in pursuit of that little extra, as long as it doesn’t cut into your high-paying customers.
At its root, this conundrum is a tension between the intuition that everyone is equal and fungible, and anything OK for one person to do, is OK for everyone to do, versus the fact that different instances of the “same” thing have different costs to provide, and different consumers have different ability and willingness to pay.
Once you notice this, you’ll see it everywhere. I’d change your “price discrimination” estimate from “there’s also some amount of” to “most of this is explainable by”.