Confusopoly (aka Dilbert's confusopoly) is confusing marketing designed to prevent the buyer from making informed decisions. The term was invented by
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 natio ...
in his comic strip
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 charact ...
. 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
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, mortg ...
director
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 (CFP ...
, championing meaningful regulation for the financial industry, used the term confusopoly to refer to large financial institutions (, 4'04"4'26") :
See also
* ''
The Dilbert Future
''The Dilbert Future'' (1997) is a book published by Scott Adams as a satire of humanity that breaks the net motivations of humanity down into stupidity, selfishness, and "horniness", and presents various ideas for profiting from human nature. ...
''
* "
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 betwe ...
" and
lemon law
* The
sexual interference hypothesis is a comparable phenomenon, involving display and
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 Choic ...
, that occurs in biological systems.
References
Imperfect competition
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