Missing Product Information Doesn’t Bother Consumers as Much as It Should.

As consumers and citizens in the internet era, we have access to more information than ever when making purchases and other choices that affect our health, safety, and well-being. But sometimes what marketers don’t say is at least as important as what they do say. But how do consumers react when marketers withhold information that would be relevant to their decisions? A series of experiments found that people were much too forgiving of deliberately undisclosed information. Despite the elegant and logical predictions of game theory, it seems we can’t count on people to notice or make the correct inferences about missing information. Even if they do notice nondisclosure, it might not occur to them that the salesperson or marketer may have something sinister to hide unless the nondisclosure is strongly flagged.

You can read the full article in Harvard Business Review.