Phoebus Cartel
Light bulbs are a bad example of the dangers of cartels. Incandescent filaments are much more efficient at higher temperature but burn out quicker. In the common case, savings from reduced electricity cost more than offset the increased replacement rate for bulbs in accessible fixtures.Short-lived bulbs were good for the customers. In a market with perfect information people would have chosen them on their own. Unfortunately of 3 categories of information needed for an informed decision (lifetime, power usage, and light output) purchasers only had a good measure of how often they replaced bulbs. Usage patterns are too complex for improvements in a single bulb to be obvious on a power bill, and human brightness perception is roughly logarithmic so it’s not visually obvious how much brighter different bulbs are.Whether it was motivated by greed or not, the Phoebus cartel is an example of big business successfully advocating for the interests of the general public in the presence of information asymmetry.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#Light_...