Ft article today 1 of 25 Apr 2024 11:14
In summary it's a massive opportunity for OBD's new technology, they just need to pull their finger out so that their salaries correspond to the value they give to their shareholders.
What can be done to cut inflation? That is a question haunting central bankers right now, given the “disappointing” trajectory of consumer price data in America, among other places.
It is also worrying politicians such as US President Joe Biden, against a backdrop of a high level of voter discontent about the economy. Investors are uneasy too. This week the gold price hit record highs, amid a search for inflation hedges.
This is, in turn, prompting some classic policy responses: on the one hand, the Federal Reserve is pledging to keep rates high to curb demand; on the other, Biden is lashing out against big business for alleged “price gouging” and/or deceptive practices such as “shrinkflation”, or selling fewer goods for the same price.
Cue a recent bizarre spat about the size of a Snickers bar. Biden suggested in his State of the Union speech that these have shrunk; Mars, the maker of Snickers, denies that.
This war of words makes for colourful debate. But as the Fed’s headache deepens, there is a far better way to frame the issue — by invoking what economists call “shrouding”. The term refers to the way prices are presented to, and concealed from, consumers, and has been widely studied by behavioural economists.
Back in the 1980s, for example, the late Daniel Kahneman worked with Amos Tversky to explore “price partitioning”, or how companies sometimes price products in multiple steps, making it hard for consumers to evaluate costs in a “rational” manner.
Hotel rooms are one example from the service sector: a low initial charge might carry subsequent high additional fees. Printers are another: a cheap printing device might require expensive ink cartridges, the cost of which are not readily visible upfront. Shipping costs are yet another example.
A cynic might shrug at this, and argue that it is just sensible behaviour on the part of profit-seeking companies. Maybe so. Consultants such as Deloitte have offered advice to their clients in recent years about how far companies can use shrouding to raise margins, without sparking a consumer backlash. But the mere fact that shrouding still exists in 2024, four decades after Kahneman and others began studying it, underscores three important points.
First, business competition does not always deliver true efficiency; markets can fail. Second, this market failure arises because consumers are not the all-knowing rational agents that they appear in economic models. They have cognitive biases that lead them to make poor choices and leave them ill-equipped to make judgments about inflation.
And third, digitisation alone does not magically fix these competition problems. Yes, it can create more price transparency in some arenas, such as airline tickets.
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