Tabarrok and Caplan at WSJ.com

Has economics been reduced to Freakonomics because so few people take it seriously, and do so few people take it seriously because mainstream economics has so little good advice on the more importants issues?

The car rental piece was interesting. I have noticed the follwing on some car rental sites:

When you enter coupons (e.g. AMEX Rewards) the regular rental rate is increased, so that the savings is limited. It was cheaper for me not to redeem car rental points on Thrifty recently.

McWop,

My experience with car rental coupons is that they are worthless. Either they only apply to "regular" (inflated) rates - your experience - or they are so tied up with restrictions, blackout dates, "not all locations," etc. that taking advantage of them is not worth the effort. Not unlike many rebates.

I guess the idea is to get you to call the company and then not want to bother calling another one, though I wonder how well this works with Internet reservations.

I was wondering about the car rental piece. Do you think most car rentals come about as a result of business travel, and consequently the governing factor is the corporate preferred provider list rather than the price? That is my experience, but I'm not sure how universal it is. We have a list of three preferred providers, and everyone winds up using Hertz at every opportunity because of some combination of Never Lost GPS systems and customer service. Price doesn't factor in.