HMF Chapter 4

Early in the chapter (section 4.1), the book says: "Just as the scale on the thermometer is arbitrary (there are two common scales, Fahrenheit and Celsius), so is the scale for measuring utility." This gave me pause. I get that with both temperature and utils, you just kinda gotta pick unites and stick with them, but the comparison doesn't extend much beyond there for me. For temperature, the 0 point is more random. Yes, Celsius using the freezing point of water but this isn't practical for all applications of temperature measurement. Whereas, with utils a negative/positive distinction would be more critical. You can't really set that randomly. Though, I wonder, can you even have negative utils?

Later in the same section, the authors talk about how diminishing marginal utilities have less of an effect on children watching children's movies. while this makes sense when you spend any time thinking about it, I was left wondering what other examples of this there were. What other groups/activities are less quickly impacted by diminishing marginal utility? Any thoughts?

Section 4.6 talks about demand when there is a access fee but no charge for usage. I am the worst about this. I'm subscribed to Netflix but when I get swept up in grad school work I often go months at a time before cycling fully through my 3 DVD at a time plan. I'll be very interested when we talk about flat-fee pricing further.

Section 3.8 discusses how media and arts are unlike other goods because they can be addicting or habit forming. For example, if you really get into the plot and characters of a show, you're more likely to keep watching and find out what happens. I wonder what effect Tivo, streaming video from network web sites and illegal downloading of programs has had on this. It seems likely that the increased supply (discussed earlier) has led to more people consuming these goods. But it would be interesting to find detailed studies one way or the other.