Supply and demand keeps getting trashed in these discussions. The problem, though, is not that supply and demand is invalid economics. It's that: (a) its application often is subject to many simplifying assumptions or caveats; and (b) you can't hope to apply it effectively until you carefully define the applicable market/service.
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Originally Posted by Cpalmson
Also worth noting is the there are subsets to each segment.
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Exactly. For some buyers, there may only be a few broad segments to the market. Within a particular segment, they may have a choice of hundreds of ladies and not care that much which one they see. And other buyers will recognize many more, narrowly defined segments -- (almost?) to the point where each lady is a single market segment for those buyers.
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Originally Posted by Cpalmson
You have to know the local market.
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Unfortunately, that is very difficult to do for a new lady. She might be able to get a sense of the supply side of the market -- what other ladies are in the market and how well they seem to be doing. Even that will be guesswork to a significant degree. And getting a sense of the demand side of the market is much more difficult, other than indirectly through anecdotal information about the relative success of local ladies within various different niches. (Members who post a lot of P4P boards are not necessarily a representative sample.) There's too much of the demand side of the market that is underground, even on a board like this. Even more guesswork or trial-and-error.
Some ladies want to be WalMart, and that's OK. Some ladies want to be Dillards, and that's OK too. Some ladies want to be Neiman Marcus, and that's OK too. But once they select a particular market niche, yes, supply and demand apply within that niche. There are plenty of customers in Dallas able and willing to pay Neiman Marcus prices, but they won't pay the same prices at WalMart until WalMart offers the same items and shopping experience. And some might stop going to Neiman Marcus if the prices doubled. And Neiman Marcus might not be successful with a store in Tyler, Texas. Not all ladies who want to be Neiman Marcus will be able to.
I don't have a clue about the local market and how a lady should market/price her services. But I am fairly confident about two things: (1) supply and demand is completely valid economics; (2) but not very useful for a lady in deciding what rates to charge in P4P.
So, can we just drop the references to supply-and-demand, whether asserting it as an iron law of economics or discounting it as irrelevant?
[/curmudgeonly rant]