Peter Klein at the Organizations and Markets blog points us to a nice piece by Thom Lambert on Britney Spears over at Truth on the Market. Lambert thinks that may be, just may be, Britney's popularity isn't due to intrinsic merit (shock, horror) but it may be due to network affects. People are interested in Britney because other people are interested in her. Lambert suggests that Britney is like the QWERTY keyboard, grossly inefficient but still hard to replace. As Klein notes, the inefficient keyboard fable has been pretty well demolished by Liebowitz and Margolis; So is Britney the first true example of market failure due to network effects?!
I can only hope that Paul David is looking into this as I type.
2 comments:
If only measuring Britney's quality were as easy as working out how often your buttons get pressed.
To identify the failure, you first have to identify the relevant market. If the relevant market isn't "producing good music" but rather is "being a focal point of good stories for folks to gossip about", I'd say she's just about perfect. Hard to imagine many other folks doing better at what she does best: doing things that let folks in trailer parks sympathize with her and buy trashy magazines with her on the cover.
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