Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2017 April 5

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April 5

Microeconomic pricing

Generally when some business sees a lot of clients, it increases the price for higher revenue. However, since low prices by definition attract more clients and high prices detract them, one might think that the better strategy would be lowering the prices instead, even if there isn't a lot of clients. For example, business A offers some service for 10$ and business B offers 25$ for the service of the same type and quality, as such the former business sees, say, 300 clients a day on average, while the latter sees 100. This would yield 3,000 $ of daily revenue for cheaper service A and 2,500 $ for service B, meaning higher revenue at lower price. Are there any references to such pricing strategy in economic theory and is there a name for it? Brandmeister^talk 08:54, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

It's not as simple as that. One trader was unable to sell her goods at a low price. After she increased her price people regarded it as a quality product and began to buy. 86.147.208.39 (talk) 10:16, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Plus, your example is in any case flawed. Your figures of 300 and 100 clients respectively would not be correct according to a demand curve. --Viennese Waltz 10:32, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

The example is correct—higher price yields lesser quantity demanded. Loraof (talk) 18:11, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

When selling a product or service, a business can use a variety of Pricing strategies that may have other motives than maximising sales volume. Veblen goods apparently contradict the Law of demand that states: as the price of a product increases (↑), quantity demanded falls (↓); likewise, as the price of a product decreases (↓), quantity demanded increases (↑)"". The illogical market response where lowering prices will dissuade (not "detract") rather than attract buyers has been characterized as "Giffen good". Blooteuth (talk) 11:43, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, looks like it's the law of demand I was looking for. Brandmeister^talk 14:34, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

@Brandmeister:, the case you describe, in which the lower price yields higher revenue, is one in which the elasticity of demand is greater than 1 in magnitude—that is, demand is relatively elastic. Loraof (talk) 18:11, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Also note that your pricing strategy shouldn't be to maximize income, but rather to maximize profit. Thus, overhead and per unit costs must be considered. Let's use your numbers and add these in:

"business A offers some service for 10$ and business B offers 25$ for the service of the same type and quality, as such the former business sees, say, 300 clients a day on average, while the latter sees 100. This would yield 3,000 $ of daily revenue for cheaper service A and 2,500 $ for service B, meaning higher revenue at lower price."

Now let's say each firm has an overhead of $100 per day, no matter what they do, and a per unit cost of $5. If they sell 100 units per day, that costs them $100 + $5(100) = $600. If they sell 300 units per day, that costs them $100 + $5(300) = $1600. So, the profits at the lower price are then $3000 - $1600 = $1400, while at the higher price they are $2500 - $600 = $1900. StuRat (talk) 04:11, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Cebuano Wikipedia

According to Wikipedia#Language editions, the largest Wikipedia (by number of articles) is, unsurprisingly, the English one, with more than 5M articles. But the second largest is Cebuano, with 4M articles, which, well, I would not have guessed. I was trying to figure out if this was some April-fools vandalism, but no, it appears to be true.

So I was trying to figure this out, and I managed to find what I think is the "random article" button in ceb.wiki (that would be ceb:Espesyal:Bisan-unsa) and tried hitting it a few times. Virtually always, there's a template referring to a bot called Lsjbot — ah, and I may have now just answered my own question; here's the botmaster's explanation.

So now I guess I'm looking for a question, because I think this is still interesting enough to post. OK, here's one: Are there other examples of a single bot so dramatically changing the footprint of a Wikipedia language edition? Or maybe of a general topic? I remember Steve Baker commenting on how many random articles were about Japanese railway stations; is that a similar effect? --Trovatore (talk) 09:10, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Swedish Wikipedia which was brought on the 3rd place, also thanks to a single bot. Waray Wikipedia too. Brandmeister^talk 09:25, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

I wonder if Cebuano will pass English. I guess I can't think of any obvious reason to think it won't. --Trovatore (talk) 09:54, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:History of Wikipedia bots. Way way back in the day, User:rambot created thousands of articles about every settlement in the United States, and you can see its effect in the huge spike in English articles beginning October 2002. Smurrayinchester 11:24, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

I don't know about the number of bots involved, but they've definitely made a big difference to a number of wikipedias. Volapük wikipedia may not seem big compared to some of the others with only about 120k articles, but when you consider the popularity of the language, it should be obvious many of these do not have substantial human involvement. I believe for a time, the Volapük wikipedia was actually one of the larger ones.

If you look at our main page, you'd note a number of wikipedias are missing despite qualifying on size to be in the various lists. This isn't an accident. In the past, the list only followed size. Then some wikipedias appeared with a lot of articles with a lot of bot involvement. For a time, a minimum depth (meta:List of Wikipedias/meta:Wikipedia article depth) was required to appear on the list. Then wikipedias started to have a high depth despite being mostly bot created. Finally the system which I think is still in place where wikipedias are not added to the list (or removed) if it's found a substantial chunk are short or stubs.

I commented at the time I suspect depth wouldn't work, and further I was concerned about the ad-hoc way the quality standard was implemented, however I decided to let it be once I tested and found there was actually a very big difference between most of those rejected and those already listed except possibly one shouldn't have been listed. Likewise www.wiki.x.io for a time was listed by size but they later chose to list wikipedias by popularity at least for the main ones (but strangely used Alexa stats rather than WMF ones initially).

Nil Einne (talk) 11:29, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

There's some comment at Wikipedia:Volapük Wikipedia about the issues of bot creation that were raised by that case. See also Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 May 2#Cebuano wiki. Nil Einne (talk) 11:36, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

• France, Nigeria and Poland all seem to have government subsidized wp programs. I noticed this a few years back when hitting the random-article button. After repeated trials, it turned out that one out of 20 English wp articles was about a Polish voivodship (township). Of course God also has an extraordinary fondness for Beatles. μηδείς (talk) 15:54, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

And (maybe more recently) not just Poland but also Iran has a huge number of villages of around 100 families on English Wikipedia. Also a huge number of soccer players have short articles. Ever since I found that out by using the random-article button, I've been considerably less impressed by English WP's 5 million article count. Loraof (talk) 18:17, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, @Loraof: It's been a while since I did the random article experiment, but anyone here can do it easily enough. If memory serves, Iran's a heck bigger than France, Germany, or Poland. BTW, the Cebuano language is actually the largest indigenous language of the Philippines by native speaker even if the Tagalog language is the state tongue. μηδείς (talk) 18:48, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Here are 10 randoms done just now. Australian politician, Iranian company, American county, international sporting event, Canadian company, Ethiopian lake, village in Kiribati, American river, American band, gastropod. Nothing relating to the very populous BRICs, quite an American selection, seemingly reflecting time put in by individual English speakers. Itsmejudith (talk) 16:35, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

I can outrandom you, Judith: Japanese manga, American politician, Romanian music producer, UK game show, US motor racing championship, Brazilian airport, Iranian village(*), list of Californian politicians, Missile Defense Integration and Operations Center, Soviet Union v Chile (1974 FIFA World Cup qualification play-off). My usual experience is Polish villages, with Iranian villages(*) in close second place. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:06, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

I should make it clear these were stubs about political sub-units, small towns, not things that just happen to be in or come from places. In other words, I ignored any article that was not about a municipality, and its still came out that 1/20th of wp articles at that time were about Polish municipaiities. μηδείς (talk) 17:53, 7 April 2017 (UTC)