OpenEcon

You are looking at pure 100% maple syrup: price about $50 a gallon. Its probably the most expensive liquid I consume. Took the kids to a maple syrup farm this weekend. Learned it takes on average 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. And one tree with one tap will produce about 10 gallons of sap per season. So four of those trees would be needed to make one gallon of syrup. Now you can see why its so expensive for the pure maple syrup, the supply is so limited. And increasing supply takes time. It would take about 40 years for a new maple sugar tree to grow big enough to tap: i.e. market supply is very inelastic. So any increase in demand will push the price higher and higher. Sure i could buy some cheaper substitute syrup but those use rice syrup or corn syrup - something much more abundant and often subsidized, and not as delicious. So I will enjoy the good stuff for now. But my elasticity of demand is not zero. If the price gets much higher I will switch to a lesser substitute. What is the most expensive liquid you buy?

Excited to see Black Panther this weekend. The hollywood prediction market www.hsx.com is indicating it will be a hit, currently predicting box office sales of $355.96 million in first 4 weeks and $176.32 in the opening weekend. Prediction markets are based on the efficient market hypothesis and the idea that markets can aggregate information and summarize the prevailing best guess of the group in a single number: a price. In other words they capture the wisdom of the crowd. They can't "predict" the future but they can tell us what future event is most probable, based on all the available information. They are used for elections, in business to select which product ideas to develop. The government even considered using them to predict geopolitical events to aid in making military strategies.

At a recent fundraiser in Detroit. The key to a good fundraiser is to convince the guests that the marginal utility/$ given to the charity is greater than the marginal utility /$ spent on themselves. Remember altruism is a rational behavior, subject to the same laws of economics as other income allocation decisions.