- Dann Corbit wrote:
- Why then, are the cards going for 3 times the MSRP?
A quick think about this from the economics perspective tells me that the likely cause of the problem is that both demand and supply of GPUs are inelastic to price.
This analysis was originally done in respect of farming products, where crops and animals take a long time to grow, and people still need to eat. In the modern world, petrol/gasoline for cars might be a better example. Here's a simplified version of the (roughly) 10 year cycle:
* oil prices are low
* as a result of this, investment in oil production is reduced
* also as a result of low oil prices, people find more ways to use oil, and people drive more
* because of low investment and increasing usage, eventually oil prices go up
* oil producers start to invest, but because the gap between investment in oil production and oil output increasing is many years, not much extra oil comes into the market as the oil price increases
* consumers also find themselves unable to reduce their usage of oil quickly
* oil prices continue to rise
* oil prices become very high
* eventually, the investment that producers made results in extra oil coming into the market
* consumers find ways to reduce their consumption of oil
* there will then be a glut of oil in the market
* oil prices will then fall dramatically and stay low for many years
...and so the cycle starts again.
As someone who is keenly interested in GPU prices, perhaps you could do some research for the rest of us on what the lag is between investment in GPU production and more GPUs becoming available?