Hearing Economics

We’ve graduated from Econ 101.  It’s time to take on Price Takers — companies that can influence Price to optimize their profits.   That’s going to take a few posts, starting with a rehash of  Econ 101 posts today.  Apologies to those who don’t like going into the weeds, but you really can’t talk about economic pricing without knowing the

Everybody needs a break, even bloggers and those who read them.  The lazy days of summer call for beach reads, not blogs.  Writers like Carl Hiassen–himself a prolific columnist for the Miami Herald— know this and churn out hilarious, diverting books for the beach. Mr. Hiassen writes darkly comedic crime novels in which weirdly bad people do weirdly bad things

Today’s post is from Guest Editor Harvey Abrams, PhD.  He picks up the hearing aid Pricing issue with a vengeance, continuing our ongoing discussion and economic analysis of Price in the industry.  The Starkey Hearing Blogs ran Dr Abram’s post on June 14, 2013 and graciously gave him permission to reformat and publish it at Hearing Economics as well.  It’s

Patent reform just got sexy in the US Congress as politicians tout “innovation, not litigation, [a]s a bipartisan goal.”  Hearing Economics did some foreshadowing of this trend based on recent patent fights in our little industry that didn’t go so well.  New hearing device patent approvals for the last two months are shown in the table below.  Click on Mar-April 2013, Jan-Feb

Are IntriCon (IIN:US) and Hi HealthInnovations still in love? The Brangelina of Audiology is rarely heard from nowadays, after almost two years together.  Hearing Economics’ interest was piqued last week when IntriCon quietly notified the SEC (US SEC Form 8-K Current Report, June 12 2013) of planned lay-offs and global strategic restructuring. The Backstory IntriCon jumped on our screen last year after it jumped into bed

A Shocking Picture   Residential AuD programs are a tough sell.  That’s the self-evident interpretation of  our survey analyses over the past three posts by Guest Editor Kevin Liebe, AuD, summarized in Figure 1 (below).    Moreover, degrees that are equivalent in the marketplace in terms of authority to practice under state licensure come with widely disparate price tags:   transitional

Tuition costs of AuD degrees at public and private schools were the topic of the first two posts in this series.  In the beginning, before residential programs, Transitional programs were the most widely used means to obtain an AuD, though they are now being phased out.  Today’s post summarizes their story and their costs. For a more complete history, be

Private schools mean huge tuition bills, right? But does that assumption hold up for doctoral programs in Audiology?  Today’s post by Kevin Liebe, AuD, checks out costs of private university programs compared to public school AuD program tuition costs discussed last week.   Private or Public?    In-state public tuition rates are lower than non-resident public tuition rates (Table 1,

“Investing in a doctoring degree in Audiology hinges on expectations and outcomes that should be anchored in real data.”  So began a previous post.  The theme is picked up today by Kevin Liebe, AuD, launching a series on AuD costs, based on data we’ve been collecting from representative educational programs.  You may be surprised.   HOW much does that AuD degree

It is a big social experiment that we’ve accidentally decided to engage in. Let’s send a whole class of people out into their professional lives with a negative net worth starting at minus tens of thousands of dollars. Those minus signs have psychological impact and a dollars-and-cents impact on what you can afford, too. {{1}}[[1]]Paraphrase of a quote by Kevin Carey, director of