(this is not a serious comment; I am just here to give Ricki a hard time)
> Each marginal student is more expensive for ... the class as a whole (because it draws from a larger number of people’s attention; as the number of people grows, the marginal additional person is less costly per student but more costly total), so it makes sense to charge them more.
The problem is, none of this cost-to-other-students is reimbursed back to those students. Really, X% of the excess revenue over $850/student should be distributed back as a discount to all students.
but also - this fails to account for the fact that conditional on more signups (and ones that fill higher slots, i.e. willingness to pay more), the earlier signups got a better bargain! like, if one person signs up for $850, they're probably overpaying, but if 60 people sign up, sure the 1st person gets less individual attention but the product they got is definitely worth way more than $850 given that others are willing to pay 5 figures for it
so in some sense the value they capture is the difference between the product's true underlying value and what they pay, and the worlds with more students shift the distribution of true underlying value, which is kinda like reimbursing them
(is this cope? maybe this is cope. i dunno man, I think if there are dozens of signups I'd feel great about being in the first 10)
I guess we're trusting you not to fudge the submissions :)
For example, say slots 1-10 are filled, Alice bids 12, then later Bob bids 11. A dishonest organizer might pretend Bob's bid came in first, so that instead of Alice getting slot 11 and Bob being out luck (per the stated algorithm), Bob gets slot 11 and Alice gets slot 12.
It's probably not the case that the optimal class size for students is 1. Or 2. In fact up until (making up a number) 8 students each marginal student is *adding* some value by making the class markets deeper and adding more chaos. Arguably student #7 adds value for 6 people, whereas student #3 only adds value for 2, so student #7 should get a better deal than #3.
So maybe you want the price to stay flat or even decrease up until you hit the "critical mass" where the class has enough people to have interesting markets but where the quadratic attention tax hasn't kicked in yet.
Arrived here from the Patrick Mackenzie interview and was pleasantly surprised by the name of your Substack 😁. If you don’t mind me asking, what is your Jewish background like?
Also coming here after hearing the Complex Systems podcast ...and apparently not the only one who checked whether I accidentally jacked up the playback speed on Spotify lol. Ricki - please keep doing these classes into the future, so I can attend in a few years - after I've had time to re-learn math/statistics well enough to intimately understand the pricing model (and related snark in comment section). For what it's worth, I've never wanted to re-learn that stuff more than I do now AND I'm utterly certain this boot camp will be more valuable than this goddam MBA I got tricked into pursuing 😆🙌
(this is not a serious comment; I am just here to give Ricki a hard time)
> Each marginal student is more expensive for ... the class as a whole (because it draws from a larger number of people’s attention; as the number of people grows, the marginal additional person is less costly per student but more costly total), so it makes sense to charge them more.
The problem is, none of this cost-to-other-students is reimbursed back to those students. Really, X% of the excess revenue over $850/student should be distributed back as a discount to all students.
I whipped up a quick sheet to demonstrate how this should work in practice: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1epV-LfRr21ApdhGtvdpVkEBaS3FYdMsK72IeVYM4hD4/
ross this is unhinged, 10/10
but also - this fails to account for the fact that conditional on more signups (and ones that fill higher slots, i.e. willingness to pay more), the earlier signups got a better bargain! like, if one person signs up for $850, they're probably overpaying, but if 60 people sign up, sure the 1st person gets less individual attention but the product they got is definitely worth way more than $850 given that others are willing to pay 5 figures for it
so in some sense the value they capture is the difference between the product's true underlying value and what they pay, and the worlds with more students shift the distribution of true underlying value, which is kinda like reimbursing them
(is this cope? maybe this is cope. i dunno man, I think if there are dozens of signups I'd feel great about being in the first 10)
I guess we're trusting you not to fudge the submissions :)
For example, say slots 1-10 are filled, Alice bids 12, then later Bob bids 11. A dishonest organizer might pretend Bob's bid came in first, so that instead of Alice getting slot 11 and Bob being out luck (per the stated algorithm), Bob gets slot 11 and Alice gets slot 12.
It's probably not the case that the optimal class size for students is 1. Or 2. In fact up until (making up a number) 8 students each marginal student is *adding* some value by making the class markets deeper and adding more chaos. Arguably student #7 adds value for 6 people, whereas student #3 only adds value for 2, so student #7 should get a better deal than #3.
So maybe you want the price to stay flat or even decrease up until you hit the "critical mass" where the class has enough people to have interesting markets but where the quadratic attention tax hasn't kicked in yet.
Arrived here from the Patrick Mackenzie interview and was pleasantly surprised by the name of your Substack 😁. If you don’t mind me asking, what is your Jewish background like?
Also coming here after hearing the Complex Systems podcast ...and apparently not the only one who checked whether I accidentally jacked up the playback speed on Spotify lol. Ricki - please keep doing these classes into the future, so I can attend in a few years - after I've had time to re-learn math/statistics well enough to intimately understand the pricing model (and related snark in comment section). For what it's worth, I've never wanted to re-learn that stuff more than I do now AND I'm utterly certain this boot camp will be more valuable than this goddam MBA I got tricked into pursuing 😆🙌