RATIONAL CONSUMERS STRIKE BACK.

RATIONAL CONSUMERS STRIKE BACK. I posted here about some of the ways that sellers can take advantage of irrational consumers. Lee Bryant sent me an article about how college textbook publishers issue new editions every few years. The result is to destroy the resale value of used copies of the books. Economists Austan Goolsbee and Judith Chevalier have done a study which shows that when a textbook reaches an age when a revision is to be expected, sales of the book drop sharply. Students take the publication date of a textbook—and therefore the resale value—into account when they are buying books.