How Has the Price of Madden Games Held Stable?

In the middle of last July, I preordered Madden NFL 10 for Wii, paying $46.99.

The Wii version was vastly inferior to the PS3 and X-Box versions, but that's another matter. As far as Wii football went, it was top of the line: new features and updated rosters. It was released right before the NFL season.

It is now the middle of June, 11 months later. The Super Bowl was played four months ago. A new version of Madden comes out in two months. There is probably less interest in football video gaming now, when football isn't in season.

Yet Madden NFL 10 still sells for ... $46.99.

Is anyone else surprised that the price hasn't dropped? Is Electronic Arts maximizing its profits with this price? People can evade the high price by buying used copies of the game or Madden games from prior years (Madden 09, for instance, is only $18.73).

Perhaps EA's stable-pricing policy encourages people to buy the game when it comes out, because they have seen year after year that the price isn't going to drop a few months later. These additional sales could more than offset the sales that EA is losing by not lowering its price in the interim months between seasons.

Can you think of any other goods that behave this way, with new versions coming out every year? What happens to the price of cars the month before the new models come out?

In the Interest of Fairness

So, I used Apple as a whipping boy the other day, because the company sometimes charges you to speak to customer service.

It turns out that iPhone support costs money, but iTunes support doesn't. Why that is, I don't know. Because my problem involved downloading a song to my phone, it could fall under either umbrella.

I was able to figure out the solution on my own, but today I got a very friendly, very thoughtful, and very thorough e-mail back from iTunes support. And they're even giving me two free song credits for my troubles.

This makes me happy as a customer, but it makes my prior blog post a bit less compelling now.

Paying Extra for Customer Support

I recently downloaded "Everlong" by Foo Fighters on my iPhone. Except, try as I might, I kept getting the following error message:

I was trying to file for support on the Apple Web site, when I learned that it costs $29 to talk to Apple if it's been more than 90 days since you bought the product. This led me to issuing the following tweet:

Eventually, I read around online and figured out that the problem could be rectified by downloading the song to my computer and going through the arduous process of syncing my phone through iTunes. So, now, it works, but I'm out an hour of effort and frustration.

A few observations:

(1) Some economists would point out that the "rational" course of action would have been to just buy the song again, as 99 cents is much cheaper than the frustration of fixing the problem. Incidentally, these same economists are morons.

(2) We really don't have much leverage with companies, do we? I can say whatever I want, but my threat to boycott Apple is an empty one. There's nothing close to the iPhone on the market, as far as I'm concerned.

(3) In theory, we're all better off if companies can charge different customers different rates, based on the cost of providing services to them. (I made this point earlier when talking about airlines.) It's probably good that the people who contact customer service all the time should pay more than the people who don't, but it's just so enraging when the product doesn't work and — oh, guess what? – you have to pay the company to tell them about it.

Bums and Inflation

Five bucks in quarters (actually, in any domination) in 1980 has the same purchasing power as $12.85 does in 2009 (you can make your own inflation calculations here).

All else equal, shouldn't there be fewer bums begging for change now (or at least fewer bums per capita), because a cup of coins can't buy as much as it used to? Are some would-be bums now instead getting jobs?

Or are some people giving bums dollar bills now? Are more passers-by likely to part with change now because coins have such trivial value?

Are bums working harder than they did a few decades ago? Are they taking more advantage of free items, such as food from soup kitchens, instead of begging for change and buying these items themselves?

Optimal Time to Rest Position Players

Major League Baseball teams play 162 games in about 180 days. With a few exceptions (such as players named Ripken or Gehrig), position players need a day off every so often to stay sharp.

For Wednesday's afternoon game, Dodgers manager Joe Torre rested four of his eight starting position players against the Diamondbacks: Rafael Furcal, Manny Ramirez, Casey Blake, and Russell Martin (all of whom, ironically, later played, as the game went 14 innings and the Dodgers needed pinch hitters). Managers often rest older players en masse in day games after the team played the night before.

Would splitting up the days off, by instead resting one starter each game, lead to more wins? Is it better to significantly reduce your chances of winning one game or slightly reduce your chances of winning four games?

I don't have a clue how someone would go about answering this question empirically.

Is Pitching Too Easy Now?

There have been 20 perfect games thrown in major league history (in nearly 400,000 games). Save for one botched call (don't even get me started ...), baseball would have witnessed three perfect games in the past 24 days.

The perfect game is supposed to be sacred. Vin Scully's call of the ninth inning Sandy Koufax's perfect game in 1965 is regarded as the best of his career (listen here). The three pages in Stephen Jay Gould's "Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville" on Don Larson's perfect game in the 1956 World Series still make me tear up (read the whole thing here).

Why is pitching so dominant these days? At what point is this string of perfect games no longer a statistical fluke? I'm having trouble finding a comparison of batting averages and runs scored leaguewide by season, but these statistics would give us a clue as to whether pitchers are beginning to get the advantage. I can note, however, the dramatic drop in home runs the past few years, which has been attributed to the crackdown on steroids and other PEDs.

Gould's book has a wonderful discussion about how the rules of baseball have changed over the years to preserve the optimal leaguewide batting average of around .260. As training and strength regimens evolve, sometimes pitchers start to get an edge over hitters (or vice versa). Various rule changes have helped restore the historical success ratios, such as cork-centered balls, the "lively ball" era, and changes to the height of the mound and dimensions of the strike zone.

Gould argues, and I agree, that baseball should never let .400 batting averages or sub-1.00 ERAs become commonplace; instead, it should tweak the rules whenever the statistics get too far out of whack.

Musings on Dry Cleaning

Why does it cost $2 to dry-clean a shirt, but $3.50 to dry-clean a tie?

Also, I've discovered first hand why few people wear white ties.