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On Sun, 23 May 2004, Jimmy Park wrote:
> What I find bothersome is when there is only a small amount of a set
> available and someone buys them all to resale. At that point I think
> the person should do the considerate thing and just take what they will
> actually use/enjoy. I see this occasionally when a limited quantity of
> a rare set is found and they quickly disappear only to return to BL or
> ebay at inflated prices. Then the seller has added no value to buyers
> (via sorting) and has just inserted himself as an additional middleman.
How about the value of making the market more efficient? Suppose that
person A is willing to pay $20 for a set and person B is willing to pay
$40 for a set[1]. Perhaps A is lucky[2] and finds the set for $20, but
that outcome does not maximize utility---for B to buy the set for $40
would result in the same utility for the buyer (albeit a different buyer)
while increasing the utility of the transaction for the seller.
Introducing middlemen encourages goods to move to those who most value
them, maximizing utility. It also allows people to make rational
decisions about how much information they want, and how much they're
willing to pay to obtain or not obtain that information.
TWS Garrison
[1] I realize that $20 may not mean as much to B as to A, but you'll have
that problem no matter how you try to convert the subjective notion of
worth into an objective measure of value.
[2] In the right place at the right time, in the right clique, etc. but
fundamentally because of a lack of information/ability on the part of the
seller to sell to he who would pay most.
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Weekly Update of New AuctionBrick Items
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| AFAIK, this seller, NinjaPrincess, is a woman who deals with bulk bought Lego which she sorts and resells. I vaguely recall her having bought some 20,000 copies of Final Duel IIs for $1 each for resale from some clearance/wholesale group. (...) (21 years ago, 23-May-04, to lugnet.dear-lego)
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