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The Price Of Fairness, Christopher Buccafusco, Daniel Hemel, Eric Talley
The Price Of Fairness, Christopher Buccafusco, Daniel Hemel, Eric Talley
Faculty Scholarship
The COVID-19 pandemic led to acute supply shortages across the country as well as concerns over price increases amid surging demand. In the process, it reawakened a debate about whether and how to regulate “price gouging”—a controversy that continues as inflation has accelerated even as the pandemic abates. Animating this debate is a longstanding conflict between laissez-faire economics, which champions price fluctuations as a means to allocate scarce goods, and perceived norms of consumer fairness, which are thought to cut strongly against sharp price hikes amid shortages.
This Article provides a new, empirically grounded perspective on the price gouging debate …