Free exchange: Cut-price economics

自由汇兑：降价经济学

Prices for many goods do not move the way economists think they should

许多商品的价格并不像经济学家认为的那样波动

When firms opt to tweak a product’s quality instead of its price, problems ensue

当公司选择调整产品的质量而不是价格时，问题随之而来

词汇

Tweak/调整；拧，扭

Aug 8th 2019

TWO YEARS ago British chocoholics felt the pinch from the decision to leave the European Union. As sterling tumbled, global firms selling to the British market faced the same production costs as before, but got less money for each sweet sold. Rather than raise the price per chocolate, some chose to shrink the chocolate per price. The famous peaks on a bar of Toblerone grew conspicuously less numerous (though Mondelez, the bar’s maker, said Brexit was not the cause). Other products suffered the same “shrinkflation”: toilet rolls and toothpaste tubes became smaller. The threat of Brexit made the phenomenon more visible, but it is surprisingly common. Statisticians and policymakers need to take note.

两年前，英国的巧克力爱好者感到了离开欧盟的压力。随着英镑贬值，销往英国市场的跨国公司面临着和以前一样的生产成本，但伴随着每一份零食的卖出所得到的利润额却变少了。与其让每块巧克力价格上涨，一些商家选择了保持价格但缩水巧克力。名气最大销量最高的三角牌巧克力条的需求数量在明显的放缓， (尽管该棒状巧克力的制造商亿滋(Mondelez)表示，英国脱欧不是原因)。其他产品也遭遇了同样的“缩水”:厕纸和牙膏管变小了。英国退欧的威胁让这一现象更加明显，但它却出奇地普遍。统计学家和政策制定者需要注意这一点。

词汇

Sterling/英镑（英国货币）；标准纯银

Tumble/摔倒；倒塌；（价格或数量）暴跌，骤降

Conspicuously/显著地，明显地

Shrinkflation/缩水式通胀

 

Every first-year economics student quickly becomes familiar with charts of supply and demand, which place price on one axis and quantity on the other. Given a drop in demand, the charts show, firms can either sell fewer items at the prevailing price or cut prices to prop up sales. But online retailing, which makes it easier to collect fine-grained price data, reveals how poorly textbook models reflect real-world market dynamics. The prices of consumer goods, it turns out, behave oddly.

每一个经济学一年级的学生很快就会熟悉供求关系图，即价格在一条轴上，数量在另一条轴上。图表显示，在需求下降的情况下，企业要么以当前价格出售更少的产品，要么降价以提振销售。但是在线销售，使得收集详细的价格数据变得更加容易，数据揭示了在真实的动态市场下，教科书的模型是多么的欠缺。事实证明，消费品的价格反映得很奇怪。

词汇

fine-grained/详细的；深入的；微粒的

 

A forthcoming paper by Diego Aparicio and Roberto Rigobon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology helps make the point. Firms that sell thousands of different items do not offer them at thousands of different prices, but rather slot them into a dozen or two price points. Visit the website for H&M, a fashion retailer, and you will find a staggering array of items for £9.99: hats, scarves, jewellery, belts, bags, herringbone braces, satin neckties, patterned shirts for dogs and much more. Another vast collection of items cost £6.99, and another, £12.99. When sellers change an item’s price, they tend not to nudge it a little, but rather to re-slot it into one of the pre-existing price categories. The authors dub this phenomenon “quantum pricing” (quantum mechanics grew from the observation that the properties of subatomic particles do not vary along a continuum, but rather fall into discrete states).

麻省理工学院(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)的迭戈•阿帕里西奥(Diego Aparicio)和罗伯托•里戈邦(Roberto Rigobon)即将发表的一篇论文有助于阐明这一点。销售数千种不同商品的公司不会以数千种不同的价格销售，而是把它们分成12到2个价格点。访问H&M(一家时尚零售商)的网站，你会发现一大堆令人震惊的9.99英镑的商品:帽子、围巾、珠宝、腰带、包、人字形背带、缎子领带、狗狗图案衬衫等等。另一大批货物的售价分别为6.99英镑和12.99英镑。当卖家改变一件商品的价格时，他们往往不会稍加调整，而是把它重新放入已经存在的价格类别中。作者将这一现象称为“量子定价”(量子力学源于亚原子粒子的性质并不沿着连续体变化，而是处于离散状态)。

词汇

Nudge/轻推；劝说【nudge marketing 鼓励型市场营销手段】

Quantum/量子论；额（特指定额、定量）

 

Just as surprising as the quantum way in which prices adjust is how rarely they move at all. Retailers, Messrs Aparicio and Rigobon suggest, seem to design products to fit their preferred price points. Given a big enough shift in market conditions, such as an increase in labour costs, firms often redesign a product to fit the price rather than tweak the price. They may make a production process less labour-intensive—or shave a bit off a chocolate bar.

价格调整和量子方式一样令人惊讶的点在于价格很少变动。阿帕里西奥和里戈邦认为，零售商似乎是根据自己喜欢的价格点来设计产品的。考虑到市场环境的巨大变化，比如劳动力成本的增加，公司通常会根据价格重新设计产品，而不是调整价格。他们可能会降低生产过程的劳动强度，或者减少一块巧克力。

 

Central banks are starting to see the consequences. Inflation does not respond to economic conditions as much as it used to. (To take one example, deflation during the Great Recession was surprisingly mild and short-lived, and after nearly three years of unemployment below 5%, American inflation still trundles along below the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2%.) In its recently published annual report the Bank for International Settlements, a club of central banks, mused that quantum pricing and related phenomena help account for such trends.

各国央行开始看到结果。通货膨胀对经济状况的作用不如过去那么强烈了。(举个例子，大萧条时期的通货紧缩出奇的温和和短暂，在失业率低于5%的近三年之后，美国的通货膨胀率仍然低于美联储2%的目标。)央行分支之一——国际清算银行(Bank for International Settlements)在最近发布的年度报告中沉思道，量子定价和相关现象有助于解释这种趋势。

 

But firms’ aversion to increasing prices may be as much a consequence of limp inflation as a contributor to it. When the price of everything rises a lot year after year, as in the 1970s and 1980s, firms can easily adjust the real, inflation-adjusted cost of their wares without putting off shoppers. A 5.5% jump in the cost of a pint after years of 5% increases does not send beer drinkers searching for other pubs in the way that a 0.5% hike after years of no change might. Thus falling inflation can make prices “stickier”. To compensate, firms instead find other ways to impose costs on buyers—such as making products smaller or lower-quality.

但是，企业对物价上涨的反感可能是疲软的通货膨胀造成的，而不是通货膨胀的原因之一。就像上世纪七八十年代一样，当所有商品的价格年复一年地大幅上涨时，企业可以轻松地调整商品经通胀调整后的实际成本，而不会吓跑消费者。一品脱啤酒的价格在经历了多年5%的上涨后上涨了5.5%，但这并没有让喝啤酒的人去寻找其他酒吧，而在多年没有变化的情况下，啤酒价格上涨0.5%或许会起到同样的作用。因此，不断下降的通货膨胀会使价格“更具粘性”。为了弥补这一缺陷，企业转而寻找其他方式来迫使消费者承担成本，比如将产品做得更小或质量更差。

词汇

Aversion/厌恶；反感

Compensate/补偿，赔偿；抵消

 

Labour markets are affected, too. Wages are notoriously sticky, especially downwards. In a world of low inflation, the ability to trim pay by raising wages less than inflation is lost to firms, with serious macroeconomic consequences. Economists blame sticky wages for causing unemployment during recessions. Facing reduced demand, firms that cannot cut pay to maintain margins while slashing prices instead reduce output—and sack workers.

劳动力市场也受到了影响。众所周知，工资是有粘性的，尤其是越往下时。在一个低通胀的世界里，企业失去了通过提高低于通胀水平的工资来削减薪酬的能力，从而导致严重的宏观经济后果。经济学家将经济衰退期间的失业归咎于粘性工资。面对减少的需求，那些不能通过降低薪酬来在价格下跌的市场下维持利润的企业选择了减少产量，并且解雇工人。

词汇

Slash/大幅度裁减或削减

 

But nimble firms have other options: the employment version of shaving a bit of chocolate from the bar. Some cut costs by boosting output per worker, often by driving workers harder. Tellingly, growth in output per worker now tends to fall in booms and rise during busts, precisely the opposite of the pattern 40 years ago, when inflation was high. Firms can respond to market pressures by reducing the benefits available to workers; Asda, a supermarket, recently announced plans to slash British workers’ holiday allowances. Or they can offer workers more tortuous schedules. Research published in 2017 suggests that being able to vary workers’ hours from week to week is worth at least 20% of their wages. On the flipside, during good times firms often opt to reward workers with office perks and one-off bonuses, rather than pay rises that cannot easily be clawed back during downturns.

但灵活的公司还有其他选择:从雇员的层面来说——在巧克力棒上拿走一点巧克力。一些公司通过提高每个工人的产量来削减成本，通常是通过提高工人的工作效率。很能说明问题的是，现在人均产出的增长趋势是在繁荣时期下跌，在萧条时期暴增，这与40年前通胀高企时的模式正好相反。企业可以通过减少工人的福利来应对市场压力;Asda超市最近宣布了削减英国工人假期津贴的计划。或者他们可以为员工提供更曲折的工作时间安排。2017年发表的一项研究表明，每周改变员工的工作时间至少相当于他们工资的20%。另一方面，在经济繁荣时期，公司往往选择用办公室津贴和一次性奖金来奖励员工，而不是在经济低迷时期难以收回的加薪。

词汇

Nimble/敏捷的；聪明的

Flipside/另一面；反面

 

The uncertainty principle

测不准原理

 

If it happens on a sufficiently large scale, the practice of tweaking quality in lieu of price could play havoc with essential economic data. Statistical agencies do their best to account for changing product quality, but if adjustments are unexpectedly common or subtle then muted inflation figures could easily be concealing a more turbulent economic picture. Central banks watching for big swings in inflation or wage growth as a sign of trouble could be reacting to figures that bear far less relation to business conditions than they used to.

如果这种情况发生在足够大的规模内，调整质量而不是价格的做法，可能会对重要的经济数据造成严重破坏。统计机构尽其所能解释产品质量的变化，但如果调整出人意料地普遍或微妙，那么温和的通胀数据很容易掩盖更为动荡的经济形势。各国央行正密切关注通胀或工资增长的大幅波动，将其视为出现问题的迹象，可能会对那些与商业环境关系远不如以前的数据作出反应。

词汇

Lieu/代替；场所

Havoc/大破坏；浩劫；蹂躏

 

What’s more, the substitution of quality for price as firms’ main way of responding to changing market conditions weakens the case for keeping inflation low and stable. Inflation makes relative prices less informative, economists reckon, making it harder to decide what to buy and how to spend. Rather than clarity, low inflation has brought a different sort of confusion: one of shrinking chocolate bars and lost holidays.

更重要的是，公司应对市场环境变化的主要方式是用质量代替价格，这削弱了保持低通胀和稳定的理由。经济学家认为，通货膨胀使得相对价格的信息含量降低，使得决定买什么和如何消费变得更加困难。低通胀非但没有带来明确的结果，反而带来了另一种困惑:巧克力棒的缩水和假期的减少。