Lecturer and originator of the Property-by-Convention Pricing Model, a formal framework for a jacket left on a café chair, developed at considerable length and defended with even more.
- Affiliation
- Slop University Department of Applied Incivility
- r.mercado@slop.university
- Contact
- Best reached after the Week 5 lecture; email otherwise, reply inside three working days.
Dr. Mercado took an undergraduate degree in Economics at the Universidade de São Paulo and a PhD in Behavioural Science at the University of Melbourne, and has spent most of the years since building what she calls the Property-by-Convention Pricing Model — a formal apparatus of scarcity, visibility, and perceived vacancy terms, arrived at, after considerable peer-reviewed effort, at the conclusion that a jacket left on a café chair usually still counts as holding it.
She presented an early version of the model at the International Workshop on Informal Economies, where it was, by her account, “very well received,” and has since resisted three separate suggestions from colleagues that the underlying finding could be stated in one sentence without the apparatus. She is, by her own admission, incapable of walking past an unattended chair in a crowded café without mentally logging it as data for a paper that, as of this bio, remains in preparation.