June 29, 2022
Something’s Up
Here’s how my mom knows something’s up:
Here’s the only slightly-more-sophisticated way economists know something’s up:
What I want to suggest is that as significant as our price inflationary woes are, they likely don’t capture the full story regarding the magnitude of dislocation that monetary inflation has caused. As with other interventions, monetary inflation see producers tinkering with many margins of adjustment besides price.
To the extent that producers have other available margins, a myopic focus on prices will understate the true magnitude of inflation. This analytic window also understates the costs.
Recently, I’ve argued for a renewed focus of what I call “micro-microeconomics.” We can begin with the most macro of phenomena. After all, there are macro questions, but only micro answers.
Economic Goods
Goods, said Carl Menger, satisfy human wants.
It turns out, though, that there’s more to goods than meets the eye. Goods are bundles of attributes, a point Yoram Barzel develops in a classic 1982 paper titled “Measurement Costs and the Organization of Markets.” What he means is that goods are a collection of characteristics that yield valuable services.
Even a simple good like an orange illustrates this point.
Oranges differ in their weight, size, color, juiciness, freshness, expiration date, sweetness, seededness, probability of transmitting disease, fertilizer used to grow them, ease of “opening” (how thick is the skin?), and capabilities in satiating hunger or slaking thirst. That’s quite a few attributes for something as simple as an orange.
Condensing Barzel’s brilliant paper quite a bit, sellers sort over some of these attributes, while buyers sort over others. When you go to the orange bin, there’s one price listed, but you don’t begin blindly grabbing oranges at random. You spend time sorting, that is measuring the oranges’ attributes, and selecting those which you judge to be a good choice given the (uniform) price posted above the bin. Typically, sellers have already pre-sorted to some degree (there aren’t usually putrid, rotting oranges in the bin), but it’s clear they leave some sorting to the buyer too because oranges in the bin aren’t perfectly homogeneous.
Consumers tend to prefer attribute homogeneity, other things equal. In other words, given some “average” level of attributes, buyers would prefer the distribution to be tighter around the mean. With a tighter distribution, they do less searching, searching takes time, and time has alternative uses.
Attributes are a Choice Variable
Producers aren’t “prisoners” of a good’s attributes.
Producer choices—ultimately aiming at satisfying consumer preference—influence the mix of goods’ attributes. For example, a choice to extend the growing season could result in oranges that are riper and larger.
In earlier work, Barzel argued that per-unit taxes cause consumers to shift out of a good’s taxed attributes and into attributes that are untaxed. In a nutshell, an excise tax (say, on cigarettes) taxes the quantity of cigarettes a consumer buys, but not the quality. Other things equal, an excise tax causes consumers to alter their composition of purchases so that higher-quality cigarettes comprise a larger share of cigarette purchases than before the tax.
Now consider two adjustments to this theory of adjustment. Imagine monetary inflation instead of an excise tax and imagine producer adjustments instead of consumer adjustments. Inflation is, among other things, an “invisible tax” (on cash-holders and savers). An increase in the money supply increases demands for goods, which in turn may raise their prices.
Of course, sellers raising their prices is an important—maybe the most important—part of any inflationary story.
But now imagine other possible adjustments for sellers. Sellers have far more margins of adjustment available to them than a myopic focus on prices would suggest.
For example, it’s well-known that sellers will sometimes maintain the prices of the goods they sell, all while reducing the size of the product, so-called “shrinkflation.” Size, mass, weight—these are all attributes of a good. Whether sellers facing inflation will a.) maintain a good’s attributes but increase its price or b.) increase the price while changing a good’s attributes or c.) some combination of the two is determined like everything else is. What’s profit-maximizing?
Here’s shrinkflation portrayed visually:
But “shrinkflation” shouldn’t get all the attention.
A Universe of Attributes
Consider just how many margins of adjustment there are. Suppose that oranges are such that visual inspection does not easily reveal bruising. Suppose further that the quality of the orange falls when it’s manhandled. A consumer only learns of this orange abuse after she removes the skin. Suppose further that there are many ways to grow, process and transport oranges, some using more labor, and some less. Lastly, imagine that the process using more labor ends up being gentler on the oranges.
One way for a producer to adjust would be to fire some of these workers (i.e. cut costs) and offer a roughed-up orange whose price hasn’t changed. That’s a margin of adjustment that may be available.
Think about the distribution of attributes within the orange-bin too. We might think of this distribution as a “meta-attribute” of the oranges with, remember, consumers preferring more homogeneity to less, other things equal. Measuring and sorting over these attributes is costly. A seller could cut costs by simply engaging in less pre-purchase sorting.
The oranges that then arrive in the bin exhibit a higher variance over the attributes consumers care about and so consumers spend more time sorting, while still paying the old money price. Measurement costs for buyers have risen, even if money prices have not. Buyers, rather than sellers, must now bear this measurement cost. Inflation by another name.
Austrian and Austrian-adjacent economists have emphasized that “shoe-leather” and “menu costs” don’t exhaust inflation’s consequences. I’d like to humbly suggest altered good attributes is another inflation cost, and one that has not received nearly the research it deserves.
Here are a few questions. What explains this variation in producer choices? Why do some producers raise prices, while others alter attributes? Why do some do a mixture of both? Is there variation among producers selling roughly the same sort of good? My intuition would suggest no, since a good’s attributes likely play a large role in determining the profit-maximizing way to adjust. Among those that change attributes, why do some select one attribute, while others choose something else?
There do seem to be some patterns that emerge. For instance, perusing Wikipedia’s article on “shrinkflation”, I’m struck that the phenomenon tends to afflict processed consumer food items disproportionately. At least, that’s the lion’s share of examples that the article offers.
Providing more rigorous microfoundations for how the inflationary process plays out seems a worthwhile, and very challenging, goal.