andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1342 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining

1342 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-24-The Used TV Price is Too Damn High


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Introduction: Rohin Dhar points me to this post : At Priceonomics, we’ve learned that our users don’t want to buy used products. Rather, they want to buy inexpensive products, and used items happen to be inexpensive. Let someone else eat the initial depreciation, Priceonomics users will swoop in later and get a good deal. . . . But if you want to buy a used television, you are in for a world of hurt. As you peruse through the Craigslist listings for used TVs, you may notice something surprising – the prices are kind of high. Do a quick check on Amazon and your suspicions will be confirmed; lots of people try to sell their used television for more than that same TV would cost brand new. . . . To test our suspicions that something was amiss in the used television market, we compared used TV prices to the prices of buying them new instead. . . . It turns out, people have very inflated expectations for how much they call sell their used TV. Only 3 of the 26 televisions we analyzed were discounte


Summary: the most important sentenses genereted by tfidf model

sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore

1 Rohin Dhar points me to this post : At Priceonomics, we’ve learned that our users don’t want to buy used products. [sent-1, score-0.568]

2 Rather, they want to buy inexpensive products, and used items happen to be inexpensive. [sent-2, score-0.548]

3 Let someone else eat the initial depreciation, Priceonomics users will swoop in later and get a good deal. [sent-3, score-0.246]

4 But if you want to buy a used television, you are in for a world of hurt. [sent-7, score-0.463]

5 As you peruse through the Craigslist listings for used TVs, you may notice something surprising – the prices are kind of high. [sent-8, score-0.614]

6 Do a quick check on Amazon and your suspicions will be confirmed; lots of people try to sell their used television for more than that same TV would cost brand new. [sent-9, score-1.005]

7 To test our suspicions that something was amiss in the used television market, we compared used TV prices to the prices of buying them new instead. [sent-13, score-1.565]

8 It turns out, people have very inflated expectations for how much they call sell their used TV. [sent-17, score-0.512]

9 Only 3 of the 26 televisions we analyzed were discounted more than 30% versus a new TV. [sent-18, score-0.334]

10 Insanely, for some TV models, the median used price is higher than the new market price. [sent-19, score-0.824]

11 People appear to be anchored to the price they originally paid for the television, not the current market price. [sent-27, score-0.564]

12 This leaves them blind to the fact that the price of a new TV is always dropping precipitously. [sent-28, score-0.449]

13 CNN illustrates: The used television market is broken. [sent-29, score-0.877]

14 It’s likely the size of the used TV market is only a fraction of how large it ought to be. [sent-31, score-0.647]

15 When I was about 5, while my dad was laid off and he was looking for a job, he had this idea that he could make some money repairing TV’s. [sent-32, score-0.32]

16 For a couple weeks (as I recall it) we had some broken TV’s around the house. [sent-33, score-0.067]

17 I asked my dad if we would get to keep it and he said that it needed a new picture tube, which he wasn’t going to get. [sent-36, score-0.24]


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tfidf for this blog:

wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)

[('tv', 0.427), ('television', 0.358), ('market', 0.261), ('used', 0.258), ('tvs', 0.213), ('suspicions', 0.194), ('priceonomics', 0.175), ('prices', 0.171), ('dad', 0.153), ('price', 0.153), ('buy', 0.145), ('sell', 0.115), ('color', 0.111), ('users', 0.105), ('repairing', 0.097), ('insanely', 0.097), ('peruse', 0.097), ('televisions', 0.097), ('anchored', 0.092), ('craigslist', 0.092), ('discounted', 0.092), ('sellers', 0.088), ('listings', 0.088), ('dhar', 0.088), ('rohin', 0.088), ('new', 0.087), ('inexpensive', 0.085), ('brand', 0.08), ('cnn', 0.08), ('inflated', 0.078), ('blind', 0.075), ('later', 0.075), ('amazon', 0.07), ('dropping', 0.07), ('laid', 0.07), ('confirmed', 0.07), ('buying', 0.068), ('broken', 0.067), ('excited', 0.066), ('eat', 0.066), ('median', 0.065), ('ought', 0.065), ('leaves', 0.064), ('fraction', 0.063), ('products', 0.061), ('expectations', 0.061), ('illustrates', 0.06), ('want', 0.06), ('analyzed', 0.058), ('originally', 0.058)]

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Introduction: Rohin Dhar points me to this post : At Priceonomics, we’ve learned that our users don’t want to buy used products. Rather, they want to buy inexpensive products, and used items happen to be inexpensive. Let someone else eat the initial depreciation, Priceonomics users will swoop in later and get a good deal. . . . But if you want to buy a used television, you are in for a world of hurt. As you peruse through the Craigslist listings for used TVs, you may notice something surprising – the prices are kind of high. Do a quick check on Amazon and your suspicions will be confirmed; lots of people try to sell their used television for more than that same TV would cost brand new. . . . To test our suspicions that something was amiss in the used television market, we compared used TV prices to the prices of buying them new instead. . . . It turns out, people have very inflated expectations for how much they call sell their used TV. Only 3 of the 26 televisions we analyzed were discounte

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