The Levitt and Dubner series dubbed Freakonomics attempted to freak the reader out by seeking answers to puzzling economic problems by recourse to tricky uses of the basic microeconomics toolkit. I don’t think it’s a better book than David Friedman’s Hidden Order, in part because it dares to be . . . wrong. But it is, in terms of interest, anyway, an able entry into the “light reading” category that economists have been essaying for thirty years or more, in books like Abortion, Baseball, and Weed. The idea is either to explain basic economics by taking a sideways view of life or to explain life by taking a fairly straightforward view of economics.

The new Freakonomics movie (yes, film, cinema, motion picture) is now available for rent on iTunes. It has not hit theaters yet, and rents for more than double other movies on iTunes. This might require an inventive (if not quite Freakonomics-class inventive) economic explanation. It’s a form of price discrimination, or the charging of different prices for the same good to different customers.

W.S. Jevons, you will remember, wrote that identical goods in the same market must have the same price. That’s a basic theorem of standard equilibrium theory.

But, since some people are willing to pay more for a good than other people are, entrepreneurs have a great incentive to charge the higher price to just those consumers, thus reaping more revenue. What entrepreneurs do is either split the market, or split the good. They make distinctions. Here, the distinction is based on time, time from the premiere of the movie.

Members of what is called the Early Adopters class are likely to spend more than those who tend only to shop for price. That is, Early Adopters aim to get things first; price shoppers aim to get things cheap. So, by setting a high, pre-theater price on the rental ticket for Freakonomics: The Movie, the marketers create a separate good, the version of the movie presented to Gotta Have It Now consumers.

Nothing freaky here. Move along.