I would consider market forces a more reasonable explanation: most people are going to pick the cheapest option. The success of cheap, flickering bulbs attests to that, I think.
It doesn't help that the old Edison screw is terrible for cooling.
There is no sane option but to pick the cheapest option. You go to the shop here and see 3 or 4 brands, and looking at the details they all seem identical. You choose your voltage, colour warmth, and if you want to pay a premium for the only brand name you recognize.
You can pick the cheapest within a range, but not the cheapest overall.
E.g. I get relatively good bulbs by requiring CRI > 90. Or just requiring no flicker, as a feature. When the producer has more than one parameter to optimize, they seem to come up with more well-rounded designs. To say nothing of the useful features I mentioned.
Yes, I likely pay 2-4 times more for these bulbs. But they perform, and they stay for years of intense use. The cheapest overall bulbs are designed for other purposes.
Good idea. I have never noticed flicker on any of my lightbulbs. I wonder if some of us are unable to see (most) flicker, even though we may otherwise have great uncorrected vision?
But little do you know, the brand was bought out by a different company so they could sell cheap junk using the reputation of the brand you chose and the review is now out of date.
Unless there's some regulatorially-mandated set of minimum standards, given the thin information channel of price ("what will I have to pay out of pocket right now for Product X, with no other indicator of quality, longevity, or potential risks"), the market will pursue low costs with an iron determination, over all other factors.
Consider that a corrolary of Gresham's Law, which in its essence says that given a nominal currency value, currency of lower determinable quality (lower specie metal content) will tend to drive higher-quality currency from the market.
"But wait, Dred," you say, "You just said that there was no other indicator of value. Why is low specie currency driving out high specie?"
Because that's not the relevant value, and it actually is apparent (or at least sufficiently so to a certain number of traders in coin). It's the nominal value that's the determinant for circulation. In the case of coin, it's face value which determines market exchange. Put another way: in a world of copper-painted zinc lozenges circulating as pennies, a diamond-encrusted gold penny will still only net you $0.01 in exchange value as currency. You're better off holding on to it or trading it for its specie / gem value.
With bulbs or electronics, the logic shifts around a bit, but the result is similar. Price becomes exchange value, product quality factors (colour registration, colour range, flicker rate, dimmer compatibility and performance, heat dissipation, any electronics buzz or hum, diffusion pattern, and most of all, that one factor you cannot determine in 3-5 minutes at a store: product life (or more properly: product-quality-life, the period of time it functions adequately before driving you bananas, even if it doesn't fully fail).
You're standing in a store aisle, or staring at an utterly uninformative webpage of quite probably counterfeit and fake-reviewed Amazon LED bulbs as well as whatever LED-bulb-adjacent search results Amazon's Alexa Search Engine has decided it needs to distract you with today, and you see two things:
- LED bulb.
- Price.
And "you" is the typical shopper. Which is to say, one who's not read this particular screed.
What are you going to do?
You're going to pick the lowest-cost bulb you see and offer a prayer to His Noodliness.
This is, incidentally, a chief reason why pure market solutions tend toward abysmal product offerings in the absence of some external regulatory, ratings, or similar systems.
There's an alternative, and some retailers follow this. Marks & Spencer in the UK long made a tradition of carrying only one exemplar of a brand, generally represented as "the best there is". That is, M&S undertake the research and quality determination costs for its customers. Your research problem is reduced to "shop M&S".
In the US there are retailers who follow a similar strategy, though emphasizing the price-quality relationship. Costco is among these, where typically only a small range of products within a category is offered (Trader Joe's operates similarly, though only in food). Friends purchased a convection toaster-oven from Costco recently -- not the cheapest model out there, but one which performs quite admirably, will handle a frozen pizza and most meals for 2-3 quite well, and (whilst slightly tricked out on controls) is fairly simple and straightforward to operate. On balance, "shop Costco" has been justified in this case.
The pure-pricing model typically works best (if at all) for nondifferentiable commodities of minimum complexity. Foodstuffs, bulk construction materials such as sand and gravel, coal, oil, etc. And yet even within each of these in developed economies you'll find grading and quality control, some imposed by government mandates, some self-adopted by industry.
And outside of bulk commodities -- in services, in wages, in rents, in interest and risk markets, in public goods -- pure market-based pricing absent various corrections, breaks down entirely or leads inevitably to pathological conditions. See "Iron Law of Wages" and "Law of Rent" -- the twin prods of numerous revolutions.
The problem with your "sane option" is that at mass market scale, say, the 100 million or so households in the US, or the 300 millions or so in China, it simply does not scale. Information and expertise implies some level of clustering and trust relations. Commodity pricing doesn't provide for this.
"This is, incidentally, a chief reason why pure market solutions"
Yes, but what is a "pure market"? I like to believe that my local home improvement or grocery store has some kind of concept of their own brand and puts some effort into getting decent products on the shelf, whether store brand or not. So, I hope that their markets are not as "pure" as online sites where anyone can sell.
You might read "pure market" as "self-interest seeking", as opposed to some entity acting as a regulator in the public interest.
In the case of a brick-and-mortar store, part of what the retailer is paying is for a physical retail location, which you might think of as access to a specific cohort of local traffic (foot, vehicle), and customers, in the sense of patronage of a retail establishment by custom (https://www.etymonline.com/word/customer).
Since that is a finite set, and there are often (though not always) competing retailers, practices which alienate customers tend to be counterproductive.
I was actually thinking of the local B&M hardware store where the staff know their products, and customers, and I've been making a series of (to date, satisfactory) LED bulb purchases whilst writing my earlier comment. What is ultimately carried is a function of the store's specific traffic, the parent corporation, and other arrangements (there are periodic government and utility incentives for low-energy bulbs), but the local staff and management have some agency.
Existential Comics' "Freedom Monster" thought experiment is worth consideration:
"yet even within each of these in developed economies you'll find grading and quality control"
I think it's an oversight to mention bulk commodities as an exception to the need for quality information. Things are bulk commodities because there are standards and regulations that enable them to be traded easily.
"Bulk commodity" in trade means that a good is comprised of units (discrete or continuous) of equally-interchangeable quality, as opposed to a good which is comprised entirely of unique entities.
If I take a brick, or a shovelful of sand, or a barrel of rainwater, a ton of iron, a bushel of wheat, a dollar or yen or pound from you, and return another to you later, it doesn't matter if you get back the same unit or a different one, so long as the quality is equivalent.
If I take a Monet or Picasso or first-edition Gutenberg Bible or the Hope Diamond, you're going to want that specific item back, not a replica, no matter how exact or precise.
If I order a package of washing-up liquid from Amazon and that goes walkabout, Amazon can simply ship another unit of soap and I'll be happy.
If I order a pair of prescription eyeglasses and those go walkabout, Amazon cannot simply redirect another customer's order to me -- the specific nature of the glasses -- prescription, frame choice, fit, lens coatings -- matter.
Bulk commodities are highly undifferentiated. Within a commodity class, they're infinitely substitutable. Once a price is determined, what you get for that price really doesn't much matter. In other words, it's the realm of market-based exchange most amenable to price-as-the-only-signal you can find.
And yet, it still doesn't rely on price-as-the-only-signal.
Even amongst commodities, there are quality measures. You want your sand to be sand, not dirt or plastic. For specific applications, river rather than beach sand. Grain is controlled for moisture content, spoilage, and insect fragments. There are quality standards imposed by mechanisms other than price.
Your (apparent) objection to my comment was actually the point I was trying to make.
I think it's interesting to consider how consumer electronics (that is, brand name, widely distributed products) share the qualities of a bushel of wheat or barrel of oil. They aren't simple or interchangeable in that there are a vast number of unique types, but they are easily traded online because the important characteristics are all available and can be relied on. They kind of seem like they share salient characteristics with commodities. So are they commodities?
Except when you go to buy the bulb that is more expensive, hoping it works better, it just ends up dying FASTER. There seems to be no correlation between price and quality anymore.
It doesn't help that the old Edison screw is terrible for cooling.