It's a thought experiment. I am telling you: "What if, for this person, in this context and situation, we could know for sure what is the best option? Would that person go for the best option or not?" and you answer "it's not possible, you cannot know".

You are right: we cannot know (that's the reason for the debate), but that's beside the point. The point is that in my opinion, if people could know for sure about the quality when they make their choice, then quality would matter to them.

I think their point was that it can still be rational to buy the item that is 20% cheaper but will break in 50% of the time. Additionally, lots of people will choose to buy the worse option because they like it's branding or whatever other irrational reason.

> But that's not my thought experiment at all.

Your claim was "if one could prove that the item which costs 25% more will last twice as long, then any rational actor would buy that one". But this is not true: a rational actor which can't afford 25% more will not care about the increased quality, they will rationally choose the shoddier good, fully knowing that it's going to break twice as fast. So yes, this is exactly your thought experiment.

> I strongly believe that they resort to irrational reasons when they don't have convincing rational ones. Again: if they don't know which one is better, they may as well take the one that looks better or that is cheaper or that their friends have. But if they could know, for sure, which one was a better deal?

It's an extremely well studied phenomenon that people don't behave like rational market actors. Unless you define "a better deal" as "the one they would be happiest with", in which case by definition anyone would prefer the "better deal".

But consider this case: some people end up caring for and loving old beat up cars that they struggle with every time they use, and that they spend inordinate amounts of money and time keeping working just one more month. Those cars objectively cost far more to maintain and have worse performance and worse externalities (pollution) than other cars they could buy. Most other people would not even buy such a car. But, again, some people love them and would not in a million years sell them to buy a "better" car. So how do we handle those people? I would call them irrational market actors. You could also call them rational market actors with a highly unexpected value function; in that case if "know for sure which one is a better deal" was specifically tailored to their unusual tastes, then you would be right, and we're just quibbling over definitions.

> fully knowing that it's going to break twice as fast

Oooh, I misunderstood your "but will break in 50% of the time". I understood that you meant "knowing that they have a 50% chance of it breaking anyway". As in "you say it's better, but in reality it has a 50% chance of breaking anyway". Which was bending the rules :-).

So yeah, now that I understand it correctly, that's a valid point: if your finances are so bad that you can't afford to pay 25% now, even though you know for sure that this 25% will be compensated to the quadruple in 1-2 years, then it is rational to take the lower quality one. But I wouldn't think that this is the case for most of the western population, and importantly that wouldn't mean that people don't care about quality.

So yeah, valid extension of my thought experiment, I apologize :-).

> I would call them irrational market actors.

I agree, emotional value is irrational (doesn't mean it's a bad thing). And this is a valid and interesting point! However, I believe that it is not in the scope of what the feature article described. People do not only care about quality, and people are not always rational. But the article is arguing that people don't care about quality. I am not saying that the most important thing for people is quality; I am saying that people do care about quality. As in, "given the chance, quality is part of the decision-making process". Not having enough money to afford it or having an emotional attachment to something may both take over quality, but it doesn't mean that people do not care about quality.

What's your opinion on that?

> So yeah, valid extension of my thought experiment, I apologize :-).

No problem, I get how my language was confusing, sorry about that.

> Not having enough money to afford it or having an emotional attachment to something may both take over quality, but it doesn't mean that people do not care about quality.

I would agree with this, actually. People definitely do care for quality to some extent, at least for many categories of products.

You fixed the rule for your thought experiment to emulate something that doesn't exist. Congratulations, you got the result you expected, and it's completely useless.

Yes, for your thought "product" that has a single quality of "how long it lasts" the "people" that all have the universal characteristics of wanting to reuse it indefinitely and absolutely no practical restrictions to cash-flow will pick the better quality one if they are acting rationally.

I see, you're not actually interested in the discussion, you just want to win an argument. You win, I'm out.