Given eBay’s relatively poor performance this year and the departure of its CEO as a result, it is not surprising that eBay is on for a change. eBay has recently notified its user the coming change in pricing. The changes has one simple goal–to attract more posting by lowering the upfront cost. For existing sellers however this comes at a heavy price, for the final value fee–the commission you would have to pay after you successfully sold your item–has been significantly raised. It’s not a bargain for most sellers: eBay lowered the upfront cost by $0.05-$0.8, in exchange for a 3.5% increase in the final value fee for the first $25 of the sold price, and roughly 0.5% increase for whatever comes after that. 3.5% of $25 would already be $0.875, but you only get a $0.8 if you are posting an auction with a starting price of $500 or above. For anything below $25 the reduction is $0.05, which means an starting price of merely $1.43 would leave you worse off under the new price scheme.

So let’s just say, eBay is in hot pursue of profit this season.

明報10月8日報導

10月7日下午，民主派舉行撐普選遊行，前政務司長陳方安生為撐傘創紀錄一刻站台，也參與了遊行，但「步行」約20分鐘後，她忽然在銅鑼灣崇光百貨對面離隊，在傳媒眾目睽睽下，走入一家髮型屋恤髮。

陳太不是政治白痴就是另有所圖，無論是何者都不值選民投她一票。

It always puzzles me why the American Economic Review (AER) does not have abstracts for its articles. This must be intentional given the obvious inconvenience–perhaps the publisher aims at forcing readers to read through more articles? Well that’s just bad and inefficient.

For those of you who know me well you understand how notoriously slow my decision making is; that’s what you get when you take economics theory literally. In any case as I ponder today I believe my decisions are correct in most cases. For one I rarely suffer from buyer’s remorse–I suppose someone who actually calculates price per ounce during the purchase of potato chips is incapable of that. At this moment I am clearly smoothing my consumption–taking a huge debt that is. Given how easy it is to sell things on Ebay and Craig’s List one could argue that borrowing, try and sell if unsatisfied is a dominate strategy. Not that this is easy to do–a lot of self control is needed for the “sell” part to work. That said, the $5000 credit card debt an average American takes on is not consumption smoothing; for them there is no foreseeable huge raise in income. I would even say the right thing for them to do should be saving.

Consumption smoothing is not as easy as it sounds; one really have to be thinking in terms of “the very long run” for this to work. And the real difficulty lies not in how much to spend but how to spend. Last but not the least credit constraint is very, very real.

【明報專訊】英國倫敦與委內瑞拉結盟，倫敦會向委國提供建設顧問援助，換取該國輸入廉價石油，預計倫敦25萬窮人受惠可半價乘搭巴士。
…
但批評者則認為，倫敦不應從窮國輸入平價原油；亦有人認為此舉會令委內瑞拉變得更窮困。但利文斯通表示，協議對雙方都有利，反映在全球氣候突變等挑戰下，全球各國正增加合作，互相依賴。但倫敦市議會保守黨發言人巴恩斯批評協議極為荒謬。他發表聲明說：「為什麼倫敦這個全球其中一個最富有的城市，竟要剝削發展中國家？這些錢直接捐給貧窮的委內瑞拉會更好。」

這些批評者有多少個是窮人？