Fair Pricing for International Participants (created with the help of Claude AI)
Purchasing-power-adjusted registration for CASK2026
We want CASK2026 to be accessible to systems and cybernetics custodians everywhere, regardless of where they live or what currency they earn in. Rather than charging a single flat fee, we offer four registration bands adjusted for local purchasing power.
The anchor price is $25 USD for the United Kingdom. All other fees are scaled from this using a composite purchasing-power index (explained below).
Find your country below, note which band it falls in, and select that ticket type when you register. This is an honour system — choose the band for the country where you live and work. If you can afford a higher band, or wish to contribute more to support others, we gratefully welcome it.
All registration revenue supports CASK. US donations to the College of Exploration, a 501(c)(3), are tax-deductible.
The Four Bands
Band A — $35 USD
The highest purchasing-power economies. Composite index 88% or above.
Canada, Norway, Switzerland, United States
Band B — $25 USD
Western Europe, Oceania, Nordic countries, Gulf States, and higher-income economies worldwide. Composite index 55%–87%. This is the anchor band.
Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kuwait, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uruguay
Band C — $15 USD
Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and middle-income economies. Composite index 35%–54%.
Azerbaijan, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Czechia, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Japan, Jordan, Lebanon, Mexico, Nicaragua, Oman, Peru, Poland, Romania, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Venezuela
Band D — $10 USD
Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and lower-income economies. Composite index below 35%.
Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Moldova, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Tanzania, Ukraine, Vietnam
If your country is not listed, choose the band that best matches your circumstances, or contact us at [email protected].
How We Built the Bands
We wanted something more grounded than guesswork, so we combined two widely used measures of relative purchasing power to create a composite index for each country.
The Big Mac Index — Published by The Economist since 1986, this compares the price of a McDonald's Big Mac across countries. It is a rough but well-established measure of purchasing power parity — how far a dollar goes in different economies. A Big Mac costs $5.79 in the United States, $5.73 in the United Kingdom, $2.62 in India, and $7.99 in Switzerland. We used January 2025 data covering 52 countries.
The Academic Salary Index — Because CASK participants are typically academics, researchers, and professionals in the systems and cybernetics field, we also looked at entry-level university professor or lecturer salaries in each country, converted to US dollars. This captures the earning power of the people most likely to attend. The US baseline is approximately $80,000 per year; the UK baseline is approximately $42,000.
The composite index is the average of two ratios: the country's Big Mac price divided by the US price, and the country's entry-level academic salary divided by the US salary. This gives a single number representing relative purchasing power. For example, India scores 28% (Big Mac at 45% of US price, salary at 10% of US level, average 28%). The United Kingdom scores 76%. Norway scores 96%.
We then set the UK composite (76%) equal to $25, and scaled all other countries proportionally. The resulting per-country fees were grouped into four bands at round price points — $35, $25, $15, and $10 — that cover natural clusters of purchasing power.
The Big Mac Index alone captures consumer prices but not earnings. Academic salaries alone capture earnings but not cost of living. Averaging the two gives a fairer picture of what a registration fee actually means for someone in each country.
Sources
Big Mac Index: The Economist, January 2025. Published since 1986 as a measure of purchasing power parity. Open data available at under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Country-level prices compiled by .
Academic salaries: ; (Boston College / HSE study of 28 countries using PPP). US entry-level baseline approximately $80,000/year from , 2025.
