Also, perhaps “super sellers” – those that are more effective at getting people to buy products for more money – actually add value for the buyer by finding the buyer a product that better fits their preferences, even if they might end up paying more than they otherwise would have? If I knew exactly what car I wanted, all I’d have to do is look for the “best deal.” If I knew that I wanted a car but didn’t know which one, a “super salesman” might be more useful than a poor one.

Isn’t this the customary, standard explanation for the effectiveness of advertising among social psychologists? I just don’t see what is the unexplained surprise here. The cognitive biases seem to cover the surprise that advertising is effective; and the asymmetry of incentive seems to cover the surprise that advertising is more talked-about than buying (except among professional corporate buyers, who buy particular products frequently enough to make worthwhile acquiring specialized knowledge in them).

So perhaps it is better to define “specialized” in terms of a frequency of similar transactions. Company buyers of our labor are in this sense more specialized than we are, and I’ll agree they are relatively expert. My point is that such buyers don’t have near as large a place in our imagination as sellers.

Paul, as I see it my theory fits lots of otherwise puzzling data, and any theory of the effectiveness of uninformative ads is going to be somewhat at odds with our self-understanding. But I’m open to hearing other suggestions. There must be some explanation.

I think sellers are more valued also because, usually, more gain is possible by being a super-excellent seller than a super-excellent buyer. A super-excellent seller can theoretically take over an entire market, at least to the point of spending all his working hours writing highly profitable contracts. Consumer buyers, and to some extent commercial buyers, are limited by their demand. If sales and buying ability are completely transferable then the imbalance probably goes away for commercial buyers, but will remain for consumers.

You can impute all sorts of wacky preferences to buyers to make ad response rational. Maybe buyers like to purchase from sellers with good taste in music? Maybe they like to buy from the people whose ads support their favorite sports team? Maybe they like television so much that they’ll buy products advertised on television just to ensure their favorite shows don’t get cancelled? Maybe information costs about products are so massively significant to them compared to the differential benefits of various products that they will either purchase based on the di minimis amount of free information in advertising or choose products at random?

The common feature of all those stories is that they defy our self-understanding of what we do when we choose to participate in a transaction, and thus demand evidence. Unless there’s some reason to believe buyers actually have the preferences in question, what’s the point?

Curt, holding constant the quality of the product, and if you only cared about quality and price, of course you’d want to frequent sellers who offered lower prices. The question is how reasonable those assumptions are about real sales.