Makes sense, right? A Giffen good — named for 19th-century Scottish economist Sir Robert Giffen — is an odd thing. It's something that people buy more of as the price goes up.

These goods are called Giffen goods. They share a few characteristics. First, they have to be the kind of thing that nobody bothers buying when the prices go up.

As Bitcoin streaks toward $6,000, I continue to think about what will drive it higher. In the near term, it struck me that Bitcoin is behaving as a Giffen good. Giffen goods are defined as "those ...

In the extreme, the Giffen behaviour itself cannot be sustained: things are truly desperate, people consume nothing but potatoes, and so if the price of potatoes continues to rise, they starve.

A Walmart store in Miami, Florida (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) One of the standard pieces of Econ 101 that we try manfully to get across to people is that if you raise the price of something ...

The paper shows how the presence of an indivisible good can cause a divisible good to be inferior and possibly Giffen. Indivisibility is shown to be central to a discussion by J.R. Hicks on inferior ...