Remember CD’s? They used to be the last word in convenient storage, and if you are of a particular age or higher “AVSEQ01.dat” will be a very evocative term indeed.
CD’s these days are available for around 15 rupees each, down from about 50 rupees a while ago, and maybe even higher. The law of demand that we have been learning about all this while suggests that the demand for CD’s should go up, since the price has come down.
Ah, but who uses CD’s these days? All the music you’d ever want to listen to and more is available on multiple streaming services. YouTube ensures that you have more video content to watch than is humanly possible, while services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have made CD and DVD players ancient relics.
In other words, tastes and preferences of people have changed, and they will not want to buy CD’s, no matter the cost. So it’s not just the price of a good, nor that of complements and substitutes that matters – it also is whether or not you want to buy the good at all or not.
And to complicate matters even further, it’s not just tastes and preferences – it’s also income!
Remember dalda? Every Indian household used to use it in the 1980’s, but families today won’t go within sniffing distance of the stuff. That’s because, generally speaking, incomes have been rising, and households now have the money to make health-conscious choices – which means dalda is out, not matter the price.
And you could say the same thing for landlines, cassette recorders, cathode ray televisions, desktops, dumbphones – and that’s just from the world of electronics. As societies progress, they experience a rise in incomes and a change in tastes and preferences – and these things impact both the demand and supply of goods.
So, in a nutshell:
The price of a good, its elasticity, the price of its complements and substitutes, changes in incomes, tastes and preferences all impact the demand (and supply) of a particular good.
Next, we’ll take a look at cross price elasticity and income elasticity.
EconForEverybody 