“plus I am an Economist. “
I once stayed at a Holiday Inn ...
You probably flunked at that too.
Incidentally, they are treating eBook best sellers as if they were commodities. They are not. In fact, the publishers do not even really compete against each other because they do not even sell the same products. Book buyers buy specific authors and they do not buy based on price. If the latest John Grisham novel is not available at a low price from one publisher, they cannot go to another and buy it from them. They don't publish John Grisham novels. Same thing for Stephen King novels. His fans cannot go to another publisher and buy the same title from them. IT doesn't happen. There simply IS no price competition. NONE, Zip, NADA. It is not as if we were talking about rice, or coal, or oil, or steel, the commodities that price fixing laws were originated about which there was a problem to fix!