> So we can't trust what consumers say they want, but we can trust what you say they wan't?
I’m not saying they want anything. I’m saying that what they want is revealed by their choices and not how they might answer any particular question when prompted. In economics this is called a revealed preference.
Yeah, it's a phrasing error... although there are species of inferred behaviors (he went into a room for an hour and then came out and walked to a store. I don't know what he did in that room but I can infer that he breathed while in it, although as with all inferences that may be untrue.)
I'm not arguing against revealed preferences as useful aggregate information regarding the probabilities of someone choosing X, I'm saying that you both can't know their intentions regarding those choices and more specifically those preferences are untrustworthy in predicting any single opportunity to choose X.
The idiocy of many current products, be they physical or informational, is replacing the user's ability to make a choice with what the product designers believe... especially without explicit agreement. In most cases the user didn't opt-in to outsourcing or subordinating their decision-making to product X and every time their intent conflicts with the product's decision-making the user will become more discontented with the product.
> Because that's what the consumer wants. Apparently.
People do not make Perfect Decisions based on Perfect Information, and this is a fine example of the wrong conclusions drawn from implicitly assuming they do.
Definitely. I worked for a couple of years on a startup that aimed to help people make better shopping decisions. In user interviews and tests, we really saw the pain. The technical term for this is "tyranny of choice". [1]
One important distinction here is that shopping behavior tends to fall into one of two modes, optimizer and satisficer. [2] Satisficers just want to pick something adequate; optimizers want to pick the best thing. Everybody does both, but people tend toward one side or another.
People here surely skew toward optimizer, so the problem is especially painful for us. Amazon's reviews have become so reliable that my first stop will often be something like Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, or SweetHome. Knowing that some other optimizer has already done the research lets makes me more comfortable making a satisficer-style choice.
Do consumers want it, or is it merely taking advantage of some more subconscious human behavior patterns. And if the latter, is this something that is bad for humankind?
> consumers have chosen with their wallets on this one.
There are plenty of situations where we do not simply let the default selection made by consumers stand, because often that choice is suboptimal or intensely shortsighted. Particularly when economies of scale often push the preferences of a small number of early-adopter consumers onto the rest of the market, whether they have the same preferences or not.
More generally, expecting a consumer operating with very limited information, limited time, and limited interest and incentives, to make a purchasing decision that may have substantial unaccounted (and unpriced!) externalities is foolish.
We should stop treating the consumer's off-the-cuff decision of what to purchase as holy writ, given the many examples of consumers happily trading away the "right" to purchase shitty products in an unregulated market for higher quality products in a regulated one.
>The problem is that the consumer usually has no way to compare quality easily
That used to be true and is an example of information asymmetry in markets - classic example being the used car market [0]. It is much less so now, when was the last time you bought anything substantial without reading a review of it or checking the customer ratings?
>If you ask a consumer whether they want a $500 product that lasts 10 years or a $200 product that lasts 2 years, they'll happily pay extra for the higher quality product.
That's not necessarily true - value decisions are more complex than that. Depending on the market, those two price points may be in different segments based on (e.g.) disposable income. Sure, for Alice, who has $500 disposable income available for a particular purchase, this might be a no brainer, but for Bob with only $200, not so much. See also Vimes' boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness [1], hyperbolic discounting [2]
> If you reduce the idea that much, it becomes meaningless.
Conversely, the idea that consumers fundamentally don't know what they want is reducing consumers so far down to their lowest common denominator that it becomes meaningless.
Where is the border between inferring what I want and deciding (for me) what I want? How about an artificially created tilt toward certain consumer or political brands in the process of inferring what I want?
> It is well documented that this is not at all what people desire from technology. What people buy directly contradicts this.
Of course, people can only buy what the market provides — and the market will exclusively (or at least disproportionately) provide the most profitable things. So market behavior isn't necessarily the best proxy for people's preferences in aggregate.
> should I, the consumer, be able to choose what I want to do
There is a whole field dedicated to engineering choices of individual humans, it's called "marketing". Oh, and also "recruitment". The choices are entirely yours, sure, and yet they're still malleable and largely predictable. I bet there is even statistics "such% of population is susceptible to this tactics, and such% of population is susceptible to that trick, and there is this negligible % of those who pretty much can't be swayed in a reliable way, but they don't matter (too few of them)".
The thing is, government prohibition is just one of the least effective methods, but it is also the laziest and easiest and most obvious one which is why people come up with it all the time.
> people buy products before sufficiently informing themselves
I think you are implying that we should socialise losses - informing ourselves is not free. We don't want to become specialists in understanding paperwork. Expecting individuals to invest time to learn how to make the perfect consumer decision is just unworkable. Making complex tradeoffs between conflicting requirements is an expensive and time-consuming process.
A11y: informing ourselves is not accessible. Not everyone is an engineer/economist type that is good at making complex tradeoffs.
I know that I use some gross heuristics and simplifications when making significant purchases (even though I have some training and natural bent towards product analysis).
> You are being manipulated and abused just like the consumers you are targeting
Their first sentence was more correct: consumers are also getting value and the question is more whether the true cost is worth the benefit. For some people it definitely is, especially those who are skeptical and thus learn/measure/etc themselves. For others they give away far more than they get. For society/humanity as a whole it’s an open question, even more so once you start to include the second-order effects (in both directions, good and bad).
> We live in an era of unprecedented consumer choice.
In some ways yes, in some ways no. Markets aren't exclusively driven by consumers and such framing is incredibly naive. You can't buy the fruit that doesn't exist.
> For any category of good you can think of there will be producers that make a high quality version of it. Consumers who care about that quality (according to however you’re measuring it) will make their decisions accordingly.
I've been a consumer my whole life, and I still struggle to "make my decisions accordingly" because it's so difficult to find trustworthy information about quality, especially the qualities that matter to me. It can take an exhaustingly long time to gather this information, there are no shortcuts, and price and quality are often only loosely correlated.
Worse, after putting in the effort, I frequently find that those high-quality products and their makers disappear from the market, being outcompeted by junk.
> If consumers make bad choices, don't they eventually learn to make better choices?
Even if we assume that consumers will learn to make good choices, that would require that they understand their choice was a bad one.
This is an A-B-C problem (antecedent + behavior => consequence). The consumer must first recognize that a negative consequence has occurred, and then determine whether it was their behavior that was flawed (they made the wrong choice) or a flawed antecedent to that behavior (they'd made the right choice, had their assumed knowledge of the situation been accurate).
Consumers don't do this though. Studies have repeatedly proved this (e.g. the very large effect of marketing and advertising on selection of products of otherwise equal quality).
Consumers may make decisions that are non-harmful (i.e. they got about the same result but simply paid more) but they certainly do not make decisions that are optimal.
I’m not saying they want anything. I’m saying that what they want is revealed by their choices and not how they might answer any particular question when prompted. In economics this is called a revealed preference.
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