"We don't want to get technical here ... but this is actually a fairly useful economic concept," he says. "First of all, when the price of anything goes up, usually what we see is sales of that thing, that product, will go down. The question is how much. And here's where elasticity is helpful because what it tells us is the percentage drop in sales as a result of some percentage increase in price.

"So, for example, if we had an elasticity of 1, that means that sales will fall by the same percentage that price rises. So, for example, if you have the price of widgets go up 10 percent and there was an elasticity of 1, that means that sales would fall by 10 percent," Walden adds. "Now most elasticities are in the range of .5 to 2, usually less for necessities like gasoline and more for luxuries."