Peter Hansen

Socrates defends justice against the attack mounted by Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, but it isn’t easy to say what the defense consists of. A careful reading shows that Thrasymachus himself is deeply though unselfconsciously attached to justice. Thrasymachus admires skillful artisans and thinks that devoting oneself to one’s art makes one a good man, worthy of good things. He feels that the skillful and unjust deserve to get the better of the artless and weak, which is to say he unselfconsciously believes in a form of distributive justice. Moreover, his surprising attachment to justice resembles and casts light on the attachment to justice that most people feel.

Misleading information and unfair commercial practices have to be viewed against the background of what consumers otherwise do, i.e., what their purchase decisions look like when no misleading information or no unfair commercial practices are in place. This article provides some of this background by studying how consumers sample information when making an in-store purchase decision. This was done by an eye-tracking study which reveals to what extent consumers succeed in purchasing the products that best meet their purchase intentions when only a representative amount of misleading information is present. The study shows that decisions were suboptimal in relation to what the consumers claimed they wanted to purchase. Only in one product category did consumers in this study actually look at products that were slightly better than average, and as a result, they mainly selected products that were just as often poor as good. If the proportion of bad purchase decisions based on misleading information is small enough, perhaps it might be better to direct the authors’ attention to other ways of improving the decision environments that consumers encounter. In addition, the eye-tracking study provides some insight into how consumers sample information when making an in-store purchase decision. The present data show that consumers invested on average of less than 1 s to look at products.