Correcting Information Asymmetry Via Deep Consumer Information; Compelling Companies to Let the Sunshine In

Consumers that want to make ethical purchasing decisions and governments that want to make policy decisions to stimulate ethical manufacturing, are left in the dark. Many products are composed of several constituting parts, with or without negative externalities, manufactured by often separate producers, which increases the general perplexity about their degree of ethicality. In ‘More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure’, Professors Ben-Shahar and Schneider have exposed systemic challenges to mandated disclosurite systems. Building upon their work, and applying their lessons, this paper explores the possibility of a disclosurite system, “Deep Consumer Information”, which does not mandate, but nevertheless compels companies, due to market forces, to disclose information about the ethicality of their products. Combining Neoclassical Economics (giving consumers the opportunity to make rational choices about the relative weights they want to give to certain ethical issues, for example via intuitive sliders on an app) and Behavioral Economics (notifying the aggregate ethicality ranking of the constituting parts of a product, that can be displayed on the screen of a phone or at digital supermarket shelves), Deep Consumer Information is trying to correct the asymmetry between on the one hand; company and consumer, and on the other; company and government.