This is a true story. The names have been changed and some personal details have been blurred by request.
In the American heartland, there lives a university professor named Fletcher. Like most university professors, Fletcher has collaborated with colleagues from around the world, including my friend Zenobia, who teaches at a college in New England. Their collaboration is relatively recent and has not yet resulted in any publications, though some of their joint work has been posted on the web.
Recently, Zenobia has started to receive (by snail mail) a number of magazines — the sort you might find in dentists’ office, like People and Working Mother — addressed to Fletcher, but at Zenobia’s home address. Fletcher purports to know nothing of how this came about, and Zenobia believes him. Moreover, a number of Fletcher’s other friends, collaborators, acquaintances and relatives have also begun to receive the same sorts of magazines with Fletcher’s name, but their own addresses, on the mailing labels.
The magazine publishers, when queried, have refused to divulge any information about who is paying for these subscriptions.
Zenobia notes that the only possible direct connection between Fletcher’s name and her own home address is that once, on the occasion of the birth of Fletcher’s first child, she used her Amazon account to send him a baby gift. However, there appears to be no similar connection between Fletcher and any of the others who are receiving magazines addressed to him.
This leaves us with two mysteries:
Mystery #1. Who is paying for these magazine subscriptions, and why?
Mystery #2. Why do Zenobia (and her husband) believe, as they say they do, that a professor of economics should be especially qualified to solve Mystery #1?
Here is the very best I can do on Mystery #1; the inadequacy of this solution should serve only to heighten Mystery #2: Fletcher wanted a digital subscription to People, but did not want a print subscription, because he didn’t want anyone to see it in his mailbox and discover that he reads People. But you can’t get a digitial subscription without a print subscription, so he= supplied a fake address, and the first one that came to mind was Zenobia’s.
This solution falters in a great many ways, and not just because it requires us to doubt Fletcher’s integrity when he denies any knowledge of the matter. It falters also because there’s no reason to think that Fletcher had Zenobia’s home address readily at hand, because there’s no reason Fletcher would need do this multiple times, and because you probably can get a digitial subscription without a print subscription (though I haven’t checked this).
So, my readers: Can you do better?
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Mystery #2. Why do Zenobia (and her husband) believe, as they say they do, that a professor of economics should be especially qualified to solve Mystery #1?<<<
I suppose that is likely because economists (much like lawyers) tend to give the impression that they believe themselves knowledgeable about EVERYTHING, and they can be quite convincing.
Mystery #1: Best guess, which I’m not at all confident in, is a colleague of Fletcher’s trying some kind of behavioural economics experiment and using grant money. It feels a little expensive to just be a prank? I can’t think what the experiment would be testing though.
Whoever is paying for the subscription would need to HAVE the home addresses/names of Fletcher’s coauthors and relatives. Some of these might be at least semi-hard to look up? Does that help us to narrow it down at all?
You say other people are receiving the “same sorts” of magazines, but are any of the magazines actually the same magazines?
Duplicate subscriptions could mean something different from similar types of magazines.
To re-cap, there are different publishers with different magazines who are sending out paid subscriptions to Fletcher, but at a variety of different addresses.
In all the cases we know of there is some connection between Fletcher and the recipient.
However, where there is no connection we have no way of knowing if a magazine has been sent. It is possible that loads of people are receiving magazines in Fletcher’s name. However, if it were a random thing, then the fact that many of Fletcher’s acquaintances have received them would suggest that most people would have done so if their connection to Fletcher were unimportant.
While far from being able to solve the entire mystery, there is a little bit I know about the magazine publishing world that may help:
Mass magazine publishing has funny economics, not in the sense that standard micro doesn’t apply to it, but rather in the sense that some of the parameters are unusual and unfamiliar from other products.
Most importantly, the marginal cost of printing and delivering another copy of many magazines is actually negative to the publisher. In other words, the ad revenues from distributing one more issue are actually larger than the cost of printing and distributing it.
So why don’t publishers distribute such magazines for free, or even give out small cash bonuses? Two reasons:
1. There are substantial fixed costs. In fact that covers most expenses of reporting, writing, and editing. So publishers try to price discriminate by getting some return from loyal subscribers to cover the fixed costs, while trying to give away the same product to anyone else.
2. Advertisers disapprove of air drops of free magazines. The idea is that anybody who pays for a magazine will likely read it and hence be exposed to the ads. However, if you give it to random people, most will use it as fish wrap and never see the ads. To avoid this problem advertisers have set up a complex system of rules to ensure that they only pay for ads in copies which the reader actually paid for.
Publishers in turn of course try to game those rules by, e.g., selling the magazine to low-demand readers for *almost* nothing or giving away “prizes” to new subscriber which may cost more than they pay for the subscription. Doubtlessly there are brigades of lawyers in pay of publishers and advertisers who have devised stratagems and counter-stratagems in this conflict.
The upshot is that it is often possible to get new subscriptions to many magazines for almost nothing in some complicated manner. So I would not worry too much about who pays for the magazine copies: the publisher is happy to do so as long as he can get the distribution somehow counted as paid.
This suggests a potential partial solution to the mystery. Maybe Fletcher came across some great give-away coupled with a new subscription and wanted to take advantage of it multiple times. Somehow the deal was such that Fletcher had to give his own name to receive the “gift,” but had to give different addresses to be counted as new subscription.
That seems like something an economist (or I) would do. The only reason I don’t boldly proclaim this as a solution is that I do not understand why Fletcher would not just admit to it or even seek advance permission from Zenobia et al. for this minor favor.
I believe doctors often get magazines they never ask for; publishers hope they will leave them in their waiting room. See this thread for example:
https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=222115
So here’s my theory. Somebody crawling the web scraping pages in an attempt to find names of doctors and their addresses. Your friend Fletcher is listed as “Doctor so-and-so” on some website listing his publications, along with his address, his collaborators and the addresses of his collaborators. The crawler is not smart enough to know who is a medical doctor and who merely has a PhD, and not smart enough to know which address goes with which name. This database of putative doctors gets sold around to publishers, and there you go.
Someone at the magazine publisher or distributor may be trying to artificially boost “sales” numbers by creating fake subscriptions. In order to obtain the names and addresses for this scheme the person is buying name lists with relevant information such as address. These lists are often from dubious sources and could include information taken from Fletcher’s computer by a hacker, and the addresses of Fletcher’s contacts on his computer have been associated with his name on the name list.
I subscribe to Barron’s. To get the cheapest rate, I subscribe to both online and print even though I only want the digital version. Every Saturday, I go out to pick up my print edition so that I can promptly throw it away.
For some reason, on the rare occasions it doesn’t show up, I complain that it wasn’t delivered.
It’s possible that someone is using her as a dump for the print version because it is the only option or because it is cheaper.
Just chiming in to say that these comments are excellent and humbling because I wouldn’t thought of any of this in a million years.