Thanks, that’s a great blog post and very relevant!
I don’t think I agree with Robin’s proposal that the main reason for all this product proliferation is that we want to have unique items—it seems to me that we have a lot of proliferation in domains where we aren’t particularly keen on expressing ourselves, like brands of pencils, consistent with the standard explanation that each entrepreneur needs a tiny bit of market power to profit from his/her innovation. But whatever the reason, I agree that Robin could well be right that in some sense we get way too much (trivially distinct) product variety by default.
Thanks, that’s a great blog post and very relevant!
I don’t think I agree with Robin’s proposal that the main reason for all this product proliferation is that we want to have unique items—it seems to me that we have a lot of proliferation in domains where we aren’t particularly keen on expressing ourselves, like brands of pencils, consistent with the standard explanation that each entrepreneur needs a tiny bit of market power to profit from his/her innovation. But whatever the reason, I agree that Robin could well be right that in some sense we get way too much (trivially distinct) product variety by default.