Return to Professor Ayres' Homepage Return to Professor Ayres' Resume In today's marketplace, retailers provide consumers with a wealth of information about the prices, qualities, and uses of their products. Conspicuously absent, however, is information about the retailer's cost or markup.
Retail sellers are generally unwilling to tell a buyer the wholesale cost of the goods they sell.
To be sure, there are counter-examples. Yet, because such representations are almost certainly false, these very examples serve only to highlight the problem. In a limited number of markets, consumers value cost information but the competitive market process does not provide it in any credible fashion. This Article examines whether consumer protection laws should be used to promote markup disclosure. Even if we achieve these goals, it does not necessarily follow that the government should intervene.