Cloud Mountain wrote:
I don't believe Audible owns anything --or publishes anything..
They are but a distributor for book publishers who put out audiobooks.
Audible puts them in their bookmarked format for limited user listening. (4 users per item)
Facebook does not own anything, does not produce any tangible products, but they own info about valuable people (Harvard graduates to start with) and a lot of commercial potentials that Microsoft is willing to pay 240 million dollars for a 1.6% stake. Here's the link:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21458486/
Actually, there is no overall/standard valuation for any idea or item in or out of market place. Everyone has his/her own valuation about everything. And those valuations are usually unequal (e.g. you prefer apples to oranges, and I prefer oranges to apples). The market place only reveals some (or we call it marginal) valuation by marginal providers or marginal comsumers of the specific valued item. For example, Facebook is at least as valuable as 240 Million dollars for a 1.6% stake for Microsoft, so Microsoft bought it for this price. However, Google did not have such high valuation for Facebook's worth, so Google was outbid by Microsoft. Microsoft paid a lot for Facebook's future commercial value, it might turn out to be a bad investment or a good one, there's uncertainty for any market place valuation and investment (for firms and for consumers as well).
For a contingency valuation (there are a lot of things that are not tangible, such as the value of democracy, free speech, freedom of any kind, charity/altruism, or environmental quality, clean water/air/land, solving the problem of global warming etc.), or for example, LV's value, there's a willingness to pay (or a willingness to accept for compensation if we sacrifice LV's enjoyment for ...) method. But there's a problem of affordability, i.e. the rich could pay more than the poor even if they put the same value on the item (the poor would willingly pay the same $ as the rich if he can afford it).
Cloud Mountain wrote:these "free" recordings aren't truly free
Water was free in the ancient time, although water is always a scarce resource. Even if the ancient did not pay for liters of water, they paid for the labor and time to get the water. And diamond is not as scarce as we think compared to its prestigiously high price, it was/still is the market manipulation of diamond providers. Housewife's chores are not truely free either, but they are offered "free" as we all comprehend the fact implicitly. Sometimes our neighbor helped us out without charge, lent us tools without asking for rental fees, or gave us some sugar/eggs/etc without charging us for the cost. Why? A sense of trust/sharing/community/solidarity/social cohesion? Schumpeter told us that Capitalism would collapse if we ignore the social cohesion factors that hold us together. Now how about the value of LV's free recordings and public domain distribution?
Knowledge helped us get this far, and helped us develop the technology to provide us all the conveniences of today. Some knowledge are free, and some are commercialized. We get a lot of help from free knowledge and some help from costly (commercialized) knowledge. Chinese would know the social cost of hiding the knowledge simply because it has vast commercial values. We have an old saying: "rather teach our daughters-in-law (of our valuable skills/secrets) than our daughters", because we are afraid that our daughters would give away the secrets to their husbands' families, so the market value of our secrets/skills would be diminished. And the fact is we lost a lot of valuable skills and secret formulas over the years. Nobody really benefited from this kind of practice in the long run. There are some kind of new variations of Chinese practice in the western world, such as the western medical service, they used the legal system and licensing practice to ban alternative medicine, so as to monopolize the medical market (they would give you some excuses of being concerned about their patients' benefit, but they were most likely concerned about sharing the market.) Medical professional community are a closed circle and medical market has the problem of extreme information asymmetry. Who would know what diagnosis is good or bad? The medical society! Doctors who practise western medicine would have no idea whether alternative medicine is good or not, but they are opposing it anyway. Why? Money talks in most cases, subconsciously or not.
Value does not always equal to the price as we saw it in the market place. For example, who could put a value/price on the life of a human being, let alone a living species. But World bank had done that and a lot of research papers and theses had tried to put value/price on a life. Do you know that a life in US would be valued at 4 Million to 20 Million according to different research/calculations, and a life in Mainland China would be valued at 800 US dollars. Why would one put a price tag on a life? It was done simply becaus we need the valuation for the job compensation (to compensate workers for a risky job), for the purpose of evaluating government regulations or evaluating public expenditure projects (such as doing the benefit-cost analysis), or for court decisions (compensations for the victims) etc.
We even tried to put value on househusband's/housewife's and children's house chores. Why? We need to put value on the household production in order to evaluate the true social welfare status and household's true purchasing power, for example, a two-earner household may earn more than one-earner household, but the purchasing power might be the same, for two-earner family has to pay maid service and babysitters and fee for household chores. So the GNP measure might not reveal the true wealth/happiness (social welfare) of a country. When there's a divorce, housewife's home production should be counted as the real-term contribution of the wife, so that is why wife is entitled to half of husband's monetary income/wealth (assuming that wife's household production is as valuable as husband's bread-earning production).
Sorry to post such a long grumble. As an economist, I just can not resist the challenge.
HC
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Editing note:
I was trying to forget that I made some typos here. Edited this post once and canceled the effort, and was trying to tell myself not to see the typos or obsessed by them. Turned the notebook on again and off again. Finally went to bed, tossed about, and off the bed. Turned the notebook back on. Doing the editing now. Hopefully getting all the typos corrected. Then I can "rest in peace". If I did not get all the typos corrected or if I've made more typos, I will try my best to forget about them. Cross my fingers for this.
That's what I was thinking.