Information You Can't Use

Abstract

Regardless of the protection problem described in our term papers, the students in our 1975 graduate course mentioned consumer as a major part of the solution. Deceptive car loan terms, misprescribed pharmaceuticals, or fraudulent car repairs would be less of a problem, we often said, if the businesses were required to provide consumers with more detailed and accurate information. Our instructor, Mary Gardiner Jones, had recently completed her service as a member of the Federal Trade Commission, and while she generally agreed with us, will always remember her lament after one too many presentations on this theme: I don't want to be required to be my own expert pharmacist, mechanic, accountant or doctor. She was a lawyer by education and that, she said, was difficult enough. A few years ago, an Atlanta car dealer was advertising two special sale options on new cars, with different sets of purchase terms stated in combinations of downpayments, annual percentage rates, and other repayment alternatives. In a friend's office, three senior professors of finance spent an hour over their note pads and calculators, unable to discern which option would be more desirable. It is possible that confusion was the advertiser's intent and that neither option was a real bargain. But an equally likely explanation is that the advertisement simply contained all of the legally-required terms that must be used to tell consumers the real costs for loans. The so-called explanations might have been very clear to the government lawyers who wrote the rules, but no one involved with writing the advertising considered composing a version in colloquial English (Rotfeld 2001). My expert colleagues had the complete information, but couldn't understand it. And then there are prescription drugs. Five decades ago, the U.S. government changed the relationships among doctors, patients, and pharmacists. Initially, prescriptions were a doctor's recommendation of a potentially useful drug, but patients did not need the doctor's permission to make a purchase and pharmacists could also make recommendations. The 1951 Durham-Humphrey Amendment defined the kinds of drugs that can't be safely used without medical supervision and restricted their sale to prescription by a licensed practitioner. In theory, with all the new drugs just starting to come out at that time, patients would be forced to have the rational and informed expertise of a doctor involved in their drug-purchasing decisions. With the medical doctors as the decision makers, for many years the pharmaceutical industry exclusively focused their brand-name promotional practices on physicians. Even with the advent of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising, the companies' sales representatives still have regular and expensive contacts with physicians, spending large sums of money per year promoting brand name drugs by giving doctors various gifts, travel subsidies, and free meals in addition to the arguably more educational (though potentially biased) sponsored teachings and symposia. As with any other product, the physician's primary source of drug information is the manufacturer. Some critics of the pharmaceutical industry assert that the companies abuse this information power and intentionally desire to mislead medical people. Regardless of whether there is intentional malfeasance, one study found that a significant number of statements from the sale representatives contradicted information readily available to them, and that the physicians generally failed to recognize the inaccuracies (Ziegler, Lew, and Singer 1995). While our personal doctors might claim that they derive their information only from research articles, there exists persistent evidence that they may be misled about a brand's value apart from the scientific data on the matter (e.g., see: Avorn, Chen, and Hartley 1982). …