this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
68 points (88.6% liked)
Asklemmy
44151 readers
1741 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
well if you want a basic idea of how prices work, then study some economics, as that's a big part of the fundamentals economists learn. Essentially a bunch of funny curve shapes that try to guess how much people will want to pay for something. Those curves change shape based on interest rates, how necessary an item is, how easy or cheap it is to make a lot instead of a little, and so on and so forth. We can use them to predict stuff but so much of economics is ultimately unpredictable because it relies on human factors.
In terms of how you behave, there's a few elements to it. With events, the window of opportunity is limited, while you can put off a new device purchase, you can't postpone the concert as an attendee, so you can't wait for a sale and FOMO is strong. Many things where you tend to impulse buy are presented as an offer you "can't put off til later", so you have to step back to see if you really need it now. Best way to try to even it out is to budget before you start checking current prices and see how they compare.
Studying economics brings little help.
First of all, the models are seemingly easy, when you compare the preference for two goods, or assume a market with a true polypol, but get incomprehensibly complex, the moment you start looking at multiple goods, typical supply chains of today and most importantly, that most markets aren't polypols, many goods aren't substituable etc.
But even assuming you have a great model understanding of things, you simply lack the information. That is also the reason, why no single actor can consistently beat the stock market, aside from shear luck (which tends to run out eventually). There will always be so much more to the picture, that you don't know, than what you know.
To be fair if the goal is understanding why, then even things like goods not being substitutable are useful for understanding. The OP wanted to know why, not know how to predict them accurately. The original suggestion to learn economics would teach them that.