Richard B. McKenzie's "Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies"

McKenzie has tried to write a popular book on behavioural economics. He certainly has provided details and in an interesting area: pricing theory. But his prose is so dense and the editing on this book is so poor, that the reading experience is painful. You can learn some things from this book but you have to pick your way through turgid prose and often read and re-read a paragraph to extract the point from the poor writing.

You won't learn any grand theories from this book. It is filled with interesting specifics, but the framework is not set up to help the reader find and absorb "the bigger picture" to help make this material memorable. This should have been a fascinating romp. And it probably should have been a great opportunity to hammer home some grand principles of behavioural economics. But McKenzie failed to achieve these goals.

He did do some interesting things. He managed to sneak a discussion of queues and gender salary inequality into a book on pricing. He has lots of material on coupons and rebates. He explores theories about prices having so many "9s" in them. He explores "free offers" and the strategy of giving away razors to sell razor blades (at least in the printer business). I really enjoyed the section on housing subsidies by universities and the unintended consequences of this strategy. In all, lots of interesting topics were explored.

The title was catchy. The topics are inherently interesting. Unfortunately this book needed to be polished by a professional writer. This kind of writing style can be inflicted on students in textbooks, but the general public won't put up with this dense style of writing.