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What can be done to cut inflation? That is a question haunting central bankers right now, given the “disappointing” trajectory of consumer price data in America, among other places.
如何削减通胀？这是目前困扰中央银行家的一个问题，特别是考虑到美国等地消费者价格数据的“令人失望”的走势。
It is also worrying politicians such as US President Joe Biden, against a backdrop of a high level of voter discontent about the economy. Investors are uneasy too. This week the gold price hit record highs, amid a search for inflation hedges.
在选民对经济高度不满的背景下，美国总统乔•拜登(Joe Biden)等政界人士也感到担忧。投资者也感到不安。本周，由于人们正在寻找对冲通胀的方式，黄金价格创下了历史新高。
This is, in turn, prompting some classic policy responses: on the one hand, the Federal Reserve is pledging to keep rates high to curb demand; on the other, Biden is lashing out against big business for alleged “price gouging” and/or deceptive practices such as “shrinkflation”, or selling fewer goods for the same price.
这反过来引发了一些典型的政策反应：一方面，美联储承诺维持高利率以抑制需求；另一方面，拜登猛烈抨击大企业涉嫌的“哄抬价格”和/或“缩减产品量”等欺诈行为，即以同样的价格销售更少的商品。
Cue a recent bizarre spat about the size of a Snickers bar. Biden suggested in his State of the Union speech that these have shrunk; Mars, the maker of Snickers, denies that.
最近关于士力架(Snickers)巧克力棒大小的争议引起了人们的关注。拜登在他的国情咨文演讲中暗示这些巧克力棒已经缩小了；然而，士力架的制造商玛氏(Mars)否认了这一说法。
This war of words makes for colourful debate. But as the Fed’s headache deepens, there is a far better way to frame the issue — by invoking what economists call “shrouding”. The term refers to the way prices are presented to, and concealed from, consumers, and has been widely studied by behavioural economists.
这场言词之战为辩论增添了色彩。然而，随着美联储头痛问题的加剧，有一个更佳的方式来阐述这一议题——那就是借用经济学家所述的“遮蔽”(shrouding)概念。这一术语指的是价格如何被展示给消费者，以及如何对消费者保持隐秘，行为经济学家已对此进行了广泛研究。
Back in the 1980s, for example, the late Daniel Kahneman worked with Amos Tversky to explore “price partitioning”, or how companies sometimes price products in multiple steps, making it hard for consumers to evaluate costs in a “rational” manner.
例如，早在20世纪80年代，已故的丹尼尔•卡尼曼(Daniel Kahneman)与阿莫斯•特沃斯基(Amos Tversky)合作研究了“价格分割”，这是指公司有时会将产品定价分为多个步骤，使得消费者难以以“理性”的方式评估成本。
Hotel rooms are one example from the service sector: a low initial charge might carry subsequent high additional fees. Printers are another: a cheap printing device might require expensive ink cartridges, the cost of which are not readily visible upfront. Shipping costs are yet another example.
酒店客房就是服务业的一个例子：初期的费用可能较低，但可能会带来高额的附加费用。打印机也是如此：一台便宜的打印机可能需要昂贵的墨盒，而这些墨盒的成本在购买时并不明显。运输成本同样是一个例子。
A cynic might shrug at this, and argue that it is just sensible behaviour on the part of profit-seeking companies. Maybe so. Consultants such as Deloitte have offered advice to their clients in recent years about how far companies can use shrouding to raise margins, without sparking a consumer backlash. But the mere fact that shrouding still exists in 2024, four decades after Kahneman and others began studying it, underscores three important points.
愤世嫉俗的人可能会对此不屑一顾，认为这只是追求利润的公司的理智行为。也许确实如此。近年来，像德勤这样的咨询公司向其客户提供了一些建议，探讨了公司在不引发消费者反弹的情况下，可以在多大程度上利用遮蔽来提高利润率。然而，即使在卡尼曼等人开始研究这种现象四十年后的2024年，遮蔽仍然存在，这一事实本身就凸显了三个重要的观点。
First, business competition does not always deliver true efficiency; markets can fail. Second, this market failure arises because consumers are not the all-knowing rational agents that they appear in economic models. They have cognitive biases that lead them to make poor choices and leave them ill-equipped to make judgments about inflation.
首先，商业竞争并不总能带来真正的效率；市场可能会失灵。其次，这种市场失灵的出现，是因为消费者并不像经济模型中表现的那样，是无所不知的理性行为者。他们的认知偏见导致他们做出不良的选择，使他们无法对通胀做出准确判断。
And third, digitisation alone does not magically fix these competition problems. Yes, it can create more price transparency in some arenas, such as airline tickets. But the internet sometimes creates so much information overload that it can also lead to shrouding, particularly when consumers are busy or poorly educated. Indeed, the image — or illusion — of online transparency can actually make obfuscation worse.
第三，单靠数字化并不能神奇地解决所有竞争问题。确实，它在一些领域，如航空票务中，能够提升价格透明度。然而，互联网有时候会带来过多的信息，导致信息过载，这在消费者很忙或教育程度不高时尤其容易引发遮蔽。实际上，网络透明度所营造的形象，或者更准确地说，错觉，可能反而会加剧信息的混淆。
Measuring the cost of this is hard, of course. But last month the London-based Behavioural Insights Team had a stab at it, and concluded that British gross domestic product would be 0.2 to 1 per cent (or £5-£23bn) bigger if shrouding did not exist.
当然，衡量这方面的成本是有难度的。但上个月，伦敦的行为洞察团队(Behavioural Insights Team)进行了研究尝试，并得出结论：如果没有遮蔽现象，英国的国内生产总值(GDP)将增加0.2%至1%（即50亿至230亿英镑）。
It arrived at that estimate by assuming that true price transparency would enable consumers to buy products and services from more efficient companies, thus raising productivity. However, it also explored another crucial issue: that one of the biggest victims of shrouding is the government, since officials running public procurement programmes also struggle to judge the true cost of the services they acquire.
当然，精确衡量这方面的成本颇有难度。通过假设真正的价格透明能让消费者向更高效的公司购买产品和服务，从而提升生产率，它得出了这个估计。然而，研究还探讨了另一个关键性问题：政府是遮蔽现象最大的受害者之一，特别是负责公共采购计划的官员也难以准确判断他们获取的服务的真实成本。
It follows that efficiency and efficacy would rise for the public and private sectors alike if there were anti-shrouding policies. These could include measures to impose standardised labelling for products and support price comparison websites, consumer advisory services and so on.
因此，如果存在反对信息隐藏的政策，无论是公共还是私营部门的效率和效果都将提升。这些政策可能包括实施产品标准化标签，支持价格比较网站，消费者咨询服务等措施。
Some free-market economists will undoubtedly wince at this and see it as unwarranted meddling, although BIT says such measures would simply “improv[e] how markets work, unleash innovation and creativity, and help people to make better choices for themselves”.
一些自由市场经济学家无疑会对此感到不安，视之为无理的干预，然而BIT却表示这些措施只是“优化市场运作，激发创新和创造力，帮助人们为自己做出更好的选择”。
Either way, American policymakers and pundits should heed this kind of research. After all, Biden is not the only politician wailing about inflation and alleged price gouging. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has expressed similar sentiments in the past.
无论如何，美国的政策制定者和评论家都应该关注这类研究。毕竟，拜登并不是唯一一个对通胀和所谓的价格操纵感到忧虑的政治家。共和党总统候选人唐纳德•特朗普(Donald Trump)在过去也表达过类似的观点。
That is unsurprising, given that bashing big business is often a vote-winner. However, it would be preferable for policymakers to find practical ways to support better price transparency, rather than terrorising the C-suite. The latter hurts confidence, while the former might actually improve competition and market functioning in ways that reduce prices.
这并不令人惊讶，因为抨击大企业往往能赢得选票。然而，政策制定者更应该寻找实际的方法来支持更好的价格透明度，而不是恐吓高级管理层。后者会削弱信心，而前者实际上可能会改善竞争和市场运作，从而降低价格。
To put it another way: if Washington wants to make sense of price trends, it needs to take a leaf out of Kahneman’s book and recognise that the perversity of human behaviour endures even in a digital world. That might not be enough to end those Snickers wars. But it would at least lead to a vision of economics more in tune with how companies, consumers and voters actually behave.
换句话说，如果华盛顿想要理解价格趋势，就需要从卡尼曼的书中吸取教训，认识到即使在数字化的世界中，人类行为的反常性依然存在。这可能无法结束士力架的争议，但至少能引导出一种更符合企业、消费者和选民实际行为的经济视角。