I think one of the biggest differences between comp benchmarking providers and RealPage is that two companies given access to the same benchmarks often make very different compensation decisions.
Some companies decide to pay at the 90th percentile of the market and some decide to pay at the 50th.
RealPage was much more proscriptive which is part of what tips the balance over into collusion vs just providing market statistics.
Zillow provides a zestimate for rents, which serves a similar market summary purpose but without the mechanism to enforce compliance and therefore is totally fine.
Price discrimination in the form of scholarships and the "show us exactly how much money is in your wallet" scam they call "need-based-aid" allowing universities have essentially perfect price discrimination and to gobble up the entire consumer surplus is definitely a big part of it.
Imagine any other service where they demanded your bank statements before they told you what they would charge you, and the impact that would have on sticker price.
If a hurricane kills a thousand people is it evil?
It's not really clear whether we're better off trying to treat corporations as moral actors and constantly being surprised when they aren't, or whether we should treat them as amoral quasi-natural processes no one has full control over and construct regulations around them the same way we do for earthquakes.
The state of Mississippi ran Parchman Farm on this principle for decades, but as you might imagine it looked a lot like slavery. A lot of people suddenly got arrested for loitering come harvest time.
This is actually pretty interesting. Generic drug manufacturing has relatively high barriers to entry, but relatively low margins because there's no way for brands to command a premium. Standardized insurance costs work to prevent price discovery, and consequently you end up with supply shocks, especially for drugs that are difficult to store.
Even given dictatorial power over the FDA I'm still not sure exactly what I would do to untangle the swirl of incentive problems here.
The theory behind invite only is that it increases the density of the network. You invite people with similar interests as this the network can nucleate around some niche, rather than being 10,000 people with nothing in common. It's one of the standard plays for overcoming cold-start problems.
American options can be exercised at any time at the investor's discretion. This means the instrument has a maximum duration, but the actual duration is up to choice of the option holder, which you can't model with an equation.
The safety problem with Li-ion batteries is the electrolyte is a flammable organic solvent. It is unrelated to the amount of energy stored in the battery under normal operation.
The data is only useful in aggregate, but different people/use cases require different types of aggregations. Using pre-aggregated data is difficult, because it almost certainly hasn't been aggregated in the way that's convenient for whatever analysis you're trying to do with it.
It looks like there is a theory that dermal bone in early tetrapods was used this way, but it's still fairly speculative. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna47176272
Some companies decide to pay at the 90th percentile of the market and some decide to pay at the 50th.
RealPage was much more proscriptive which is part of what tips the balance over into collusion vs just providing market statistics.
Zillow provides a zestimate for rents, which serves a similar market summary purpose but without the mechanism to enforce compliance and therefore is totally fine.