When I was considering whether or not I objected to various types of advertising, it seemed like a substantial question to consider would be information asymmetry, since that seems to be a substantial part of ads.
For instance take the following advertisement:
Buy one get one free.
And then much later in small print Items ring up at 50% off regular price. (After all, it doesn’t help you sell as much of a profit if they just buy one, there is no reason to specifically call attention to this.)
And then not even stated on the page And by “regular price”, we mean what other people might consider a fake price that the goods are at only the legally minimum required amount of time so that we can claim that they have been discounted, because people love getting discounts and we know this.
Or for anecdotes, the “regular price” of a store brand of Diet soda I buy frequently is now 1.19. I don’t think I actually remember ever seeing it at that price. It is always at a “discount” However, it is now more expensive than it used to be. They can raise the price and discount at the same time.
It seems like in general, a lot of these kinds of sales tactics are specifically related to information asymmetry.
Now, this kind of information asymmetry can be reduced.
For instance, consider an app where you can scan the barcode and get a rescalable graph of the price which shows the information about the price over time, or if you wanted to be thorough, information about the price over time at rival stores.
That’s just going from one data point to two, and retail establishments are already objecting because it is hurting their sales. Imagine if you could instantly generate a three dimensional graph which compared the past year of prices over time at 10 stores and the reason for discounting. All of that is publicly available information. And it wouldn’t require any new hardware to make such an app. So it seems very likely it might happen in the future.
Then you could have customers who upon seeing your ad would say: “Well, I could buy this TV here at Best Buy at 50% off for 400 dollars, but Belmont TV is probably going to have it for 300 dollars when they have their birthday sale in a few days, so I’ll wait and then ship it from there.”
This app seems like it would be a good thing to have.
That’s a bit longer than I thought it would be, but it does seem to cover the bases. What do you think?
When I was considering whether or not I objected to various types of advertising, it seemed like a substantial question to consider would be information asymmetry, since that seems to be a substantial part of ads.
For instance take the following advertisement:
Buy one get one free.
And then much later in small print Items ring up at 50% off regular price. (After all, it doesn’t help you sell as much of a profit if they just buy one, there is no reason to specifically call attention to this.)
And then not even stated on the page And by “regular price”, we mean what other people might consider a fake price that the goods are at only the legally minimum required amount of time so that we can claim that they have been discounted, because people love getting discounts and we know this.
Or for anecdotes, the “regular price” of a store brand of Diet soda I buy frequently is now 1.19. I don’t think I actually remember ever seeing it at that price. It is always at a “discount” However, it is now more expensive than it used to be. They can raise the price and discount at the same time.
It seems like in general, a lot of these kinds of sales tactics are specifically related to information asymmetry.
Now, this kind of information asymmetry can be reduced.
For instance, consider an app where you can scan the barcode and get a rescalable graph of the price which shows the information about the price over time, or if you wanted to be thorough, information about the price over time at rival stores.
Basically, like the app in this link, but even more so: http://www.psfk.com/2012/01/amazon-retail-showroom.html since that only compares to Amazon’s current prices.
That’s just going from one data point to two, and retail establishments are already objecting because it is hurting their sales. Imagine if you could instantly generate a three dimensional graph which compared the past year of prices over time at 10 stores and the reason for discounting. All of that is publicly available information. And it wouldn’t require any new hardware to make such an app. So it seems very likely it might happen in the future.
Then you could have customers who upon seeing your ad would say: “Well, I could buy this TV here at Best Buy at 50% off for 400 dollars, but Belmont TV is probably going to have it for 300 dollars when they have their birthday sale in a few days, so I’ll wait and then ship it from there.”
This app seems like it would be a good thing to have.
That’s a bit longer than I thought it would be, but it does seem to cover the bases. What do you think?