Monday, February 12, 2007

Disturbing Keyword Search

People come to this site via some pretty bizarre Google searches, but this one concerned me more than most: the more water i drink the thirstier i am.

You might want to talk to a doctor about that. As an economist, all I can say is you've come down with a severe case of increasing marginal returns.

2 comments:

Blar said...

Aren't these marginal returns negative, rather than increasing (assuming that positive is the expected, beneficial direction of reduced thirst)? We don't have enough information to say whether the returns diminish or increase at the margin, since we don't know if the nth gulp augments their thirst by more or less than the (n-1)th gulp.

Glen Whitman said...

Blar -- yeah, I thought of that interpretation. But I chose to interpret "thirst" as the expected marginal satisfaction from the next gulp of water. In other words, I'm figuring that for this person, each gulp satisfies the pre-existing thirst but is for some reason followed by new (and larger) thirst.