Calling Bruno Gaucho

[milkman]

Hey has anyone out there been able to get through to Bruno Gaucho?

I decided to take the plunge and book him but I can't get through. Every time iI call his listed number I get his voicemail box and it always says its full. Anybody able to reach him and get an appt? Does his number work?

Thanks.

[ad rian]

Are you for real? Is he?

[ad rian]

An economist's take on young Mr. Bruno:

 

"Giffen good

 

A commodity for which demand increases at higher prices and falls at lower prices. This odd feature - that price rises cause demand to increase - was observed by Sir Robert Giffen (1837-1910) of basic commodities in the budgets of the nineteenth-century poor. As the price of bread rose, the poor, who always relied on it as their staple diet, could simply no longer afford to buy other relatively more luxurious food items, which they had to replace with increased purchases of bread. Similarly, because bread constituted the bulk of their spending, when its price fell, they enjoyed such a large increase in their real income that they could then afford to substitute for bread in their diet other more palatable food.

 

The `giffen paradox' is explained within the normal framework of demand and supply analysis. When the price of any good rises, it has two effects: it changes the relative attractiveness of other goods, increasing the desire of consumers to buy more of items whose price has not risen - the substitution effect. It also has an effect on the spending power of consumers, who can do less with their money than they could before prices rose, as though their income had fallen and no prices had changed. This is called the income effect. Two features explain the characteristics of a giffen good. First, demand for it rises as the income of consumers falls (it is always inferior). But secondly, what essentially accounts for its perverse behaviour is the fact that this income effect on the demand for the giffen good outweighs the substitution effect which for all commodities causes consumers to switch purchases from items whose prices rise.

 

The giffen good, usually considered too much of a freak to be of anything except theoretical interest, should not be confused with items that enjoy `snob value'. These too can enjoy simultaneously rising prices and demand, accounted for by the fact that some consumers delight in paying for the knowledge that certain of their possessions are expensive. Such behaviour can be explained as a form of signalling. The usual way of viewing this `snob effect' is to treat a change in price of an item to which it applies as a change in the fundamental characteristics of the product sold, making it wholly incomparable to the same physical object sold at a different price and not therefore an item for which a single demand curve can be constructed.

 

 

The Penguin Dictionary of Economics, © Graham Bannock, R. E. Baxter and Evan Davis 1998"