I have been trying to point out that in our lives chance may have an astonishing influence and, if I may offer advice to the young laboratory worker, it would be this—never neglect an extraordinary appearance or happening. It may be—usually is, in fact—a false alarm that leads to nothing but may, on the other hand, be the clue provided by fate to lead you to some important advance.
Sir Alexander Fleming

Knowledge and science are nothing but perception.
Plato

I had the great fortune of seeing The Rolling Stones in concert on Wednesday and having gone to concerts for decades, it was the best I had ever seen. The high-resolution video screen, at 55m wide and over 14m tall, was almost worth the price of admission by itself. But, of course, all eyes eventually trained themselves on Ronnie Woods, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger. Jagger, now 80, skipped about the stage like a grade schooler, belting out one monumental hit after another with a voice seemingly untouched by age. I cannot recommend this show enough. I’d tell my friends to see them before they’re gone, but then I said the same thing the last time I saw them—in 1981.

As someone prone to figuring out how buyers work in markets, I stared into the seats numerous times. Like everyone else, We purchased our tickets online and weighed the distance and angle to center stage against the prices offered for each seat. Ticket prices ranged from about $80 to over $6400. Sitting up 14 rows above the floor in the far end zone of So-Fi, I noticed a lack of uniformity in how the seats filled up. In (A) and (B) below, I found a pair of matching seat banks on either side of the venue that never filled in like the rest of the facility. Those seats were better than ours, closer to the stage, but the added cost didn’t justify us buying a seat there. That’s the way we saw it.

Everyone else saw it the same way. They sat vacant until the show started.

Simply put, the prices for those seats put people off. They were too high.

Now, in a place with over 70,000 people for a football game, losing revenue on a few hundred seats is not a big deal to The Rolling Stones.

However, it points to a central tenet of my book, Hypernomics: Using Hidden Dimensions to Solve Unseen Problems: buyers ultimately determine prices for all products based on their features.

A few months after its release, on July 11, 2024, that book reached Number 1 on the Amazon Best Sellers list in its Macroeconomics section (C).

If you manage The Rolling Stones and know rock fans worldwide will come to their concerts, you needn’t worry about the finer points of getting your product and its price right.

But if you don’t run the Stones and want to understand how the economic world works, read my book. It doesn’t so much change the world as it reveals it.

You’ll want to read it before you leave 500 seats vacant.

#hypernomics #value #therollingstones