If everyone had to disclose their margins and we removed this information asymmetry, it could be a great thing for consumers, and a great thing for efficient markets.
There are a lot of grandmas and tech illiterate people buying laptops for incredibly inflated prices, from often smaller and more questionable computer shops. We're talking about 5 year old CPUs, 4GB of RAM, sometimes even a hard drive and no solid state drive.
If they had to disclose that the $999 laptop they're selling only costs $400 and they make a margin of $600 on it, and the consumer takes their money elsewhere and buys a genuinely reasonable laptop, I think that's a fantastic outcome.
There are a lot of grandmas and tech illiterate people buying laptops for incredibly inflated prices, from often smaller and more questionable computer shops. We're talking about 5 year old CPUs, 4GB of RAM, sometimes even a hard drive and no solid state drive.
If they had to disclose that the $999 laptop they're selling only costs $400 and they make a margin of $600 on it, and the consumer takes their money elsewhere and buys a genuinely reasonable laptop, I think that's a fantastic outcome.