On Tuesday, January 16, 2018 at 6:20:04 PM UTC-5, Mad Roger wrote:
On Tue, 16 Jan 2018 14:41:54 -0800 (PST),
trader_4 wrote:

You did when you said:


"I think price is not an indication of anything other than what the
marketing can make people pay. It's certainly not an indication of quality."

Do you really think that a prime steak has the same price as a choice
steak, or a select grade steak? That a top quality 10" chef's knife
from Henckel, Wusthoff, Misono doesn't reflect that quality and require
a much higher price than the $5 10" chef knife at the discount store?
The prices are correlated to the quality of the product. The same applies
to brake pads, certainly to some extent.

You didn't understand a single word I said.
Either that, or you just want to argue.

Funny remark coming from the guy where Clare and others here have told
you that you're the one who just wants to argue and can't be educated,
even after they've made 20 posts trying.




We agree on the curves being *different* for things that are perceived to
be different.

Not just "perceived", for things that ARE different. A better performing
brake pad is typically more expensive to produce, which makes the supply curve
different. It has a different demand curve from customers and the balance
point where supply and demand meet reflects that in a HIGHER market price
for the pads with the better performance.



If a tire to a billion people is NOT a commodity (there doesn't seem to be
a word for the opposite of a commodity), then each one has a certain demand
curve.

And why then would this not be true of brake pads too? Tires are optimized
for various performance characteristics and there are tires that cost more
that perform better than cheap tires. Same thing with brake pads. But
according to you, performance and price are never correlated.




If those same tires *are* considered a commodity to another billion people,
then those tires, to those people, have a *different* (lumped together as
one) commodity-based demand curve.

Either you understand that, or you just want to argue for argument's sake.
I am done with arguing what is in *every* Economics textbook on the planet.

I can't teach you an entire course in Economics 101 in just a Usenet
thread. You either understand the basics, or you don't.

I understand economics perfectly. And I understand brake pads enough
to know that THEY AREN'T ALL THE SAME COMMODITY ITEM.

Then why did you say this:


"I think price is not an indication of anything other than what the
marketing can make people pay. It's certainly not an indication of quality."

Do you think you can manufacture the best performing brake pads for
the same price as the most basic ones? That consumers value the two
the same? Good grief.



It's just like
the steak and chef knife examples I gave you. Good grief, Clare has
explained over and over to you that there are substantial and important
differences in brake pad choices. You came in here with the angle that
it's all about the coefficient of friction. It's been pointed out
to you that there are many other characteristics that differentiate
pads, yet now you want to segue into economics and claim that they
are all the same, so price and those characteristics have no relationship.
It's just that you want to make
them all the same to justify your foolish remark:


"I think price is not an indication of anything other than what the
marketing can make people pay. It's certainly not an indication of quality."

Quality isn't even the right term here, because strictly speaking
from a manufacturing perspective, quality is delivering a product
that meets the specification, on time. You could have a product spec
that has a tolerance of +/- 10 thousandths of an inch in a dimension and one
that has a tolerance of +/- 1 thousandth. If all the product coming
out of those two different lines meets the production spec, then it's
all quality product, good product, as far as quality measurement goes.

What makes one pad cost more is differences in the composition and
manufacturing which results in different
performance parameters, which to you and customers could be loosely
called "quality", in layman's terms.




It's marketing's job to increase *perception* of value.

If you like beef and don't like pork, then the curves are different.

The curves would always be separate demand curves, they are two different products.



If you don't care, and if it's all just "meat" to you, then they're not.

Only if it's sold as mystery meat that can be either beef or pork.




This is extremely basic stuff covered in the first weeks of class.

And sadly you didn't learn economics any better than the technical
details of brake pads.