>What I've described above are "the basic economic laws" that override your "basic intuition". There are more subtleties, of course, but in aggregate and with m

>What I've described above are "the basic economic laws" that override your "basic intuition". There are more subtleties, of course, but in aggregate and with market efficiency, reality tends toward the case described. It's a little silly that you would say that when you were just doing back-of-the-hand calculations to justify banning parallel imports, don't you think? I've already covered your response in my previous comment. I'm not "curious" about parallel imports either, they're a well-defined economic case that has been the subject of plenty of research. There's a great discourse on the subject, since some of the primary variables in analyses of parallel import policy are price elasticity and regulatory effects. The modeling of simple example goods with perfect elasticity, like I was doing there, is not really a question. You only get more interesting results when you take goods that are exotic for having huge fixed production costs or price inelasticities, or markets that are highly asymmetric in the parallel importation context. Pharmaceuticals make for a great case, one which has really taken off in recent years. The Maskus paper that your article mentioned like a citation but then failed to cite for some reason provides a good jumping-off point. Kanavos et al. [1] then provide some real-world considerations with data from the EU; and Grossman and Lai [2] provide a revised viewpoint that considers regulatory factors in better focus. [1]: http://archives.who.int/prioritymeds/report/append/829Paper.pdf http://archives.who.int/prioritymeds/report/append/829Paper.... [2]:http://www.princeton.edu/~grossman/ParallelImports.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~grossman/ParallelImports.pdf But I don't want to be getting too deep into a discussion about exotic cases here--those are just interesting instances of them. My primary point is that, like I originally said, the intuitive reasoning that politicians and people use to justify banning parallel imports is just speculation in the face of legitimate economic considerations. There's real economics behind issues of parallel importation that needs to be respected, and I'd like it if people would understand that before arguing in favor of anti-parallel-importation laws.