Economics of the Cartel Market: Bioware should lower prices to increase profits

And how do you know this? What data are you drawing from to reach this conclusion? Your entire argument rests on the assumption that the demand function is highly elastic, but you have failed to actually substantiate this assertion in way whatsoever. It sounds like you were, for whatever reason, suddenly compelled to show off your newly discovered knowledge of basic microeconomics.

Also, a 'luxury good' is a good for which the demand rises as income rises. It has nothing to do with demand elasticity.

By now people need to understand that Bioware / EA don't give a crap about their gamers. All of the outstanding bugs, catering to the cartel market, long wait times on the phone with customer service, etc. If they really cared all of the bugs and server stability would have been fixed by now and they wouldn't have to lie or mislead people about the expansion. They did say at first that the expansion was going to be free.

Do you seriously think EA/Bioware is not monitoring the number of purchases and adjusting costs as they see fit? Do you really think that they have not considered the basic rules of economics? Really?

Why do people who have no data to support their theories feel the need to act like they know better?

1) Things change. Get off the 'free expansion' bit and suck it up. It's $10. If you think nothing ever changes then you're either under 18 and lack any right to complain about how real life works or over 18 and simply blind.

2) I have seen fewer bugs in SWTOR than any other MMO, aside from Rift, that I have played in a decade. It seems to me at least half of these 'bugs' are due to your rigs, not due to the game being buggy. And no, I do not have a top-end $3500 rig with 3 screens, etc.

So people need to spend a lot of money upgrading their computers with all of current upgrades to play a game?? I may upgrade my graphics card, but that is an easy less money problem fix. Some of us don't have the money for current computer upgrades.

That's called Mount Stupid.

I think the cartel items are overpriced, meaning they are not set at the market clearing price or the equilibrium price. BioEA might have data indicating otherwise--maybe hordes of people are paying $20 to get their hands on valiant jedi, for example--or they're just guessing high.

Yes.
No.
Because SWTOR is very, very, very expensive on the Cashshop compared to competitior MMORPGs, including Warhammer Online which was run by Bioware EA for a couple of years.

No point arguing with people here on the threads is pointless since they are usually set in one way. If your post has any semblance of reasoning or logic that could point to supporting your side, the opposition always chooses to ignore it and move on as if it never happened.

Internet forums are more like a bathroom walls, people say whatever they feel like and there's hardly any intellectual back and forth going on.

The data they provide is in no way supposed to make you money, it's a mere market analysis. It's not a get-rich-quick scheme. It's relatively standard practise for that sort of data to be paid data, as the analysts desire to provide their family food as well .

Yes, that's the way computer gaming works. Every year games release which are increasingly demanding, it's standard practise. It's already bad enough that they can't optimize game engines to their full extent without leaving behind those players who do not upgrade. But in all honesty, if you can't upgrade your PC hardware at least every 3 years, you're better of doing the industry and PC gamers a favor by switching to consoles.

A lot of the current performance issues are coming from people with 4GB of RAM, even though 8GB of RAM was already well affordable with the introduction of WAR in 2008. Many people are still using DX9 graphics cards and then complaining on lag even though in 2006 the first DX10 graphics cards have already been introduced, let stand simply using a DX11 card which have been introduced somewhere late 2009 or early 2010. Not to mention players using HDD's rather than SSD's, even though SSD's have been introduced in 2006 and are quite affordable since 2009, currently going for as cheap as around 70 ~ 80$ for a very decent model.

Not to mention CPU wise the ancient tech some people are using.

BioWare trying to compensate for that by making the game compatible with that sort of junk easily rips off about 30% of potential performance, the rate which is frequently seen by making the simple move in games to switch from DX9 to DX11.

Not to mention the benefit the game can have by being allowed to use extended RAM usage on 64 bit systems with 16GB+ RAM. A lot of loading screens on planets could be taken out as the game could much more freely use all of the RAM in one go what it needs to, without needing to worry about passing the RAM limit which causes 32 bit systems to simply close off the client abruptly.

TL;DR Games would have a lot less performance issues if people would just start upgrading their junk so developers don't have to aim for 10-year backwards compatibility anymore.

People wanting to sell you stuff, sell you what you want to be sold.