I have long thought that a significant source of profit is the marginal cost of ignorance. I will tend to buy a good at the lowest price I can achieve consistent with the marginal cost of finding a lower price still. If I can get a 10% discount on a $100 transaction by opening a leaflet I will probably do that; if I can gain another 2% by spending 2 hours driving round every store in town to compare prices, I probably wont bother. In other words, the marginal cost of the extra knowledge exceeds my expectation of the potential saving and the surplus value of that ignorance goes into the retailer's pocket who offers me the fastest way to the optimum saving.

Unfortunately, modern information technologies, especially the Internet, are making the marginal cost of the extra knowledge much nearer trivial for the most desirable consumers.

Imagine what would happen to pricing power if every person who walked through the shop door knew exactly how much every product or service in my shop cost to produce, what every one of my competitors was selling it for and every one of their terms and conditions by heart. Imagine how grateful I would be if they still walked in my shop. Imagine what it would do to business models even if 50% of the market knew that much.

The obvious strategy is to find ways of increasing that knowledge gap again so that profits are maintained and one of the most effective ways is to lie, cheat, hide and obfuscate until the dollars are safely in your own pocket. Here's a review of a new book on the subject called, The Liar's Tale by Jeremy Campbell

While accepting in an ideal world that the truth should be the rock on which the norms of civilised behaviour are built, Campbell's judgment is: "For better or worse, lying, untruth, is not an artificial deviant or dispensable feature of life." If he is right, we can press the delete button on "Always tell the truth" and insert Campbell's pronouncement that society has evolved to the point where it "can no longer survive on a diet as thin and meagre as the truth".