Increasing Information transparency

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Breadcrumbs: The Future of Ubiquitous computing in 2025 --> Economical Driving Forces: Increasing Information transparency

Description

The basic economic theory of supply and demand assumes that customers have complete information about suppliers. This assumption doesn't work in the real-world market, just partly in the financial markets.

Internet services such as Froogle represent a major shift in the transparency of products' information. Ubiquitous computing is very likely to make further steps to the delivery of complete information (product cost, availability, source, composure etc.) about suppliers and their products to the customers.

Enablers

  1. Increasing broadband internet coverage
  2. Growing complexity of related internet services such as Froogle
  3. Product information published on the internet by the suppliers

Inhibitors

  1. Suppliers' tendencies not to publish transparent information. Such an approach can be seen already today for instance among the cellular networks providers (misguiding packages) or airlines (unclear final price, different price every day).

Paradigms

  1. The future behaviour of consumers can be learned from today's services already, although the suppliers' comparison is still limited. When complete information of suppliers and their products is easily available, the competition among suppliers will increase dramatically.
  2. The importance of product related services will be the key for customer's decision to buy or not to buy.
  3. More and more products will be perceived as commodities.

Experts

Froogle

Timing

Dec 2002: Formal announcement of Froogle

Web Resources