1. How Singapore advertises itself.
2. Markets in everything: Tokyo's cat cafes, good photos.
3. Mas-Colell on capital theory paradoxes.
4. New schemes for restaurant pricing, including the sale of tickets.
5. How will the IMF bailout of Greece be funded?
I laughed pretty hard at Mr. Austrian Economics Guy in your first link, who is effusively praising a state-owned enterprise.
Tickets. What an idea.
There are already tickets sold to meals, but generally the meals are served as an adjunct to other activities, e.g., Midevel feasts, award dinners, and charity functions.
I like this concept.
more details on the consequences of the Greek bailout and the issues that still remain:
http://www.goldalert.com/stories/Gold-Price-Up-as-Money-Printing-Rages
“New schemes for restaurant pricing”
Of course restaurants already provide discounts on slow days, but they’re not as straightforward as charging less for everything on Wednesday nights. And you can see why — you want to provide a discount to price-sensitive Wednesday night customers, but not to those who, for example, are eating out on Wednesday because they eat out almost every night. Specials achieve that while across-the-board discounts don’t.
For a good paper on restaurant pricing see: Haddock and McChesney (1994), Economic Inquiry; for an incoherent paper on restaurant pricing see Becker (1991), JPE. For a discussion that includes both, see Gisser et al. (2009), EJW.
If the book “Asian Godfathers” is to be believed, Singapore’s main market for luxury condos is not Westerners or even Malaysians but rather Indonesians. For all the stereotypes about how staid and strict Singapore is, it still offers three things that Indonesia does not: legal gambling, legal prostitution, and banking secrecy laws to match Switzerland’s. Many of Indonesia’s elite apparently have second homes in Singapore.
Singapore comes across as saying, “Do well and live comfortably in
clean, elegant surroundings. We will help you do that.” Not a bad
goal but an incomplete one, being rather lop-sided.
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