Link Harvest: Shrouded Attributes

Turns out there is an economic term for a phenomenon I tried to describe in this piece on text messaging and this earlier piece on cable: that consumers make selection based on relatively few obvious criteria and providers try to obscure other criteria that consumers may care about, but are not the basis for a decision.

The term is "shrouded attributes," and it is described in 2006 Article by Xavier Gabaix and David Laibson.