Brittany and Michael Countdown to Nobel Prize in Economics: Day t-5

Humans have many ways to communicate. Sometimes it’s with their words. Sometimes it’s with their body language. But sometimes it’s by spending a lot of money that provides very little actual value other than to convey private information to someone else. This type of spending pattern is done all the time, and probably wasn’t as common for most of human history given most of us were just barely breaking even with our daily calorie spending. It’s very hard to signal how awesome you think you are with spending on calories after all, but as humanity experienced a surge in income and living standards never before seen, it became possible to get information about ourselves out in all kinds of cost discriminating ways. Later experimental work even found evidence for this kind of phenomena. It’s time to wind mash the sands of time back up the top of the hour glass and celebrate another economist who was robbed of the Nobel Prize with a full-throated defense by Brittany and Michael from …