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Confusopoly
Confusopoly (aka Dilbert's confusopoly) is confusing marketing designed to prevent the buyer from making informed decisions. The term was invented by Scott Adams in his comic strip Dilbert. Adams defined a confusopoly as ''"a group of companies with similar products who intentionally confuse customers instead of competing on price"''. For example, similar items like mobile phones are advertised at various price plans according to different combinations of available minutes, text messaging capabilities and other services, thus making these offers practically incomparable when it could be easy to price similar units of usage to allow informed comparisons. The term confusopoly also applies because confusion within the targeted consumer group is purposefully maintained, so choices are based on emotional factors. The term has been adopted by economists. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Richard Cordray, championing meaningful regulation for the financial industry, used the t ...
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Scott Adams
Scott Raymond Adams (born June 8, 1957) is an American author and cartoonist. He is the creator of the syndicated ''Dilbert'' comic strip, and the author of several nonfiction works of satire, commentary, and business. ''Dilbert'' gained national prominence during the downsizing period in 1990s America and reached a worldwide audience. Adams worked in various business roles before he became a full-time cartoonist in 1995. He writes in a satirical, often sarcastic way about the social and psychological landscape of white-collar workers in modern corporations. In addition Adams has written books in various other areas, including the spiritual experiment ''God's Debris'' encapsulating a form of pandeism, and books on political and management topics, including '' Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter''. Early life Adams was born in 1957 in Windham, New York, the son of Paul and Virginia (née Vining) Adams. He is of half-German descent and also has English, Iris ...
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The Dilbert Future
''The Dilbert Future'' (1997) is a book published by Scott Adams as a satire of Human nature, humanity that breaks the net motivations of humanity down into Intelligence (trait), stupidity, selfishness, and lust, "horniness", and presents various ideas for Profit (economics), profiting from human nature. The final chapter invites the reader to ponder upon several open-ended questions, such as the nature of gravity and the utility of affirmative prayer, affirmations, which are further addressed in ''God’s Debris''. Adams makes several "predictions" throughout the book intended for humorous effect: *"There will be two types of people: Superstars and perspiration wipers. Those who are neither will be managers" *"In the Future, the value of your job will decrease, thanks to the godforsaken hellhole of North Dakota". *The book anticipates a fictional food item (which Adams references as the Dilberito) which is explained as a food source containing 100% of a human's daily nutritio ...
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The Market For Lemons
''The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism'' is a widely-cited 1970 paper by economist George Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only "lemons" behind. In American slang, a lemon is a car that is found to be defective after it has been bought. Suppose buyers cannot distinguish between a high-quality car (a "peach") and a "lemon". Then they are only willing to pay a fixed price for a car that averages the value of a "peach" and "lemon" together (''p''avg). But sellers know whether they hold a peach or a lemon. Given the fixed price at which buyers will buy, sellers will sell only when they hold "lemons" (since ''p''lemon  ''p''avg). Eventually, as enough sellers of "peaches" leave the market, the average willingness-to-pay of buyers will decrease (since the average quality of cars on the market decreased), leading to even more selle ...
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Dilbert
''Dilbert'' is an American comic strip written and illustrated by Scott Adams, first published on April 16, 1989. It is known for its satirical office humor about a white-collar, micromanaged office with engineer Dilbert as the title character. It has spawned dozens of books, an animated television series, a video game, and hundreds of themed merchandise items. ''Dilbert Future'' and ''The Joy of Work'' are among the most read books in the series. In 1997, Adams received the National Cartoonists Society Reuben Award and the Newspaper Comic Strip Award for his work. ''Dilbert'' appears online and as of 2013 was published daily in 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries and 25 languages. Publication history ''Dilbert'' began syndication by United Feature Syndicate (a division of United Media) in April 1989. On June 3, 2010, United Media sold their licensing arm, along with the rights to ''Dilbert'', to Iconix Brand Group. This led to ''Dilbert'' leaving United Media. In late Decembe ...
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Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is an agency of the United States government responsible for consumer protection in the financial sector. CFPB's jurisdiction includes banks, credit unions, securities firms, payday lenders, mortgage-servicing operations, foreclosure relief services, debt collectors, and other financial companies operating in the United States. Since its founding, the CFPB has used technology tools to monitor how financial entities used social media and algorithms to target consumers. The CFPB's creation was authorized by the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, whose passage in 2010 was a legislative response to the financial crisis of 2007–08 and the subsequent Great Recession. The CFPB's status as an independent agency has been subject to many challenges in court. In June 2020, the United States Supreme Court found the single-director structure removable only with-cause unconstitutional but allowed the agency to remain ...
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Richard Cordray
Richard Adams Cordray (born May 3, 1959) is an American lawyer and politician serving as the COO of Federal Student Aid in the United States Department of Education. He served as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from 2012 to 2017. Before that, Cordray variously served as Ohio's attorney general, solicitor general, and treasurer. He was the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio in 2018. Cordray was raised near Columbus, Ohio and attended Michigan State University. He was subsequently a Marshall Scholar at Brasenose College, Oxford and then attended the University of Chicago Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the ''Law Review''. In 1987 he became an undefeated five-time ''Jeopardy!'' champion. Cordray was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives in 1990. After redistricting, Cordray decided to run for the United States House of Representatives in 1992 but was defeated. The following year he was appointed by the Ohio Attorney Ge ...
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Multiple Sexual Ornaments
Many species have multiple sexual ornaments, whereby females select mating partners using several cues instead of only one cue. Whereas this phenomenon is self-evident and hence long recognized, adaptive explanations of why females use several instead of only one signal have been formulated relatively recently. Several hypotheses exist, but mutually exclusive tests are still lacking. Hypotheses There are several hypotheses that attempt to explain why a male would have multiple sexual ornaments. Multiple messages hypothesis The multiple message hypothesis states that different ornaments signal different properties of an individual's overall quality. Models support the possibility that this hypothesis is evolutionarily stable but empirical tests are lacking. Some ornaments represent long-term or short-term changes in overall condition. Elegant plumes in a bird or antlers in a deer grown once a year could signal the overall condition of an animal during the long period of growth; t ...
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Mate Choice
Mate choice is one of the primary mechanisms under which evolution can occur. It is characterized by a "selective response by animals to particular stimuli" which can be observed as behavior.Bateson, Paul Patrick Gordon. "Mate Choice." Mate Choice, Cambridge University Press, 1985 In other words, before an animal engages with a potential mate, they first evaluate various aspects of that mate which are indicative of quality—such as the resources or phenotypes they have—and evaluate whether or not those particular Phenotypic trait, trait(s) are somehow beneficial to them. The evaluation will then incur a response of some sort. These mechanisms are a part of evolutionary change because they operate in a way that causes the qualities that are desired in a mate to be more frequently passed on to each generation over time. For example, if female peacocks desire mates who have a colourful plumage, then this trait will increase in frequency over time as male peacocks with a colourful ...
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