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?