John Hull: >Of course Michael Etchison may be right as well (if I read him correctly), in that firms engage in hueristic pricing and just toss bathroom maintenance into the mix.<
What firms think they do, and what they actually do, are neither identical nor even coextensive, of course. A firm may well adopt a policy of instituting and rigorously following procedures at the end of which an array of goods and prices will univocally emerge. Just between us, the rigor is not what it seems, in my book. It is, rather, a way of presenting what is at bottom an inherently and unavoidably imprecise, possibly inarticulate (if not inchoate) hunch about what the consequences of such an array might be. It is a matter at least as much of rhetoric, as of calculation: The act of calculation is itself rhetorical. And, not only is such an approach rhetorical, it is _not falsifiable_. The firm's response to what happens after the array is instantiated is, at bottom, heuristic, a reasonably disciplined search for a reasonably coherent and administrable plan for how to identify data as relevant and interpret them, and of what to do about the (reasonably disciplined) inferences the heuristics set up. Put the other way 'round: From the _customer's_ point of view, the entire experience of deciding to enter the premises, deciding what to do there, and so on is a "mix," which is subjectively taken and assessed all at once (though much of what happens has something to do with particular parts of the experience and particular stated prices, and so on). If that is so, then whether he knows it or not, all of the seller's presentation is a "mix," into which every component is willy-nilly thrown. Michael Michael E. Etchison Texas Wholesale Power Report MLE Consulting www.mleconsulting.com 1423 Jackson Road Kerrville, TX 78028 (830) 895-4005
