Ayaan Mittal
Jaipur, India·Writer and Head of Marketing, The Reader's Voice
Specialises in: Consumer Economics, Sports Economics, Consumer Finance
Community Writing
Articles by Ayaan Mittal
5 articles
Consumer EconomicsYour Data Is Not Being Sold. It Is Being Used to Guess What You Would Have Paid.
The great data scandal of our age is not theft. It is estimation. Firms are using your data to answer one question: what is the absolute maximum you would have paid before walking away.
Sports EconomicsA Human Being, Depreciated Evenly
Football clubs record players as intangible assets and write them down on a straight line. The transfer market has spent a decade reorganising itself around that convention, and the rules keep arriving a season late.
Consumer FinanceWho Actually Pays For Your Cashback?
Imagine three people buying the same 400 rupee coffee at the same Starbucks in the same queue. One pays cash, one scans a UPI QR, one taps a credit card. All three pay 400 rupees. Two days later, exactly one of them finds eight rupees of cashback in their statement and feels quietly clever about it. Nobody printed those eight rupees. They came from somewhere.
Labour EconomicsThe Applause Discount: How the Jobs We Call Noble Learned to Pay the Least
In March 2020, Britain stood on its doorsteps at eight in the evening and clapped for the NHS. Twelve months later, the government offered nurses in England a 1 percent raise. That sequence is not a British scandal. It is a pricing mechanism, and it runs identically in Jaipur, Osaka and Long Beach.
Consumer EconomicsThe Mermaid Tax: How Starbucks Turned Indian Aspiration Into Profit
You are not a rational consumer. You are a beautifully predictable one, and Starbucks understands you better than you understand yourself.