Seen in this way, the popularity of third-party product testing could be interpreted as simply reflecting an entirely reasonable ongoing efort on the part of households to gain information on the basis of which to direct consumption in a maximally eficient fashion. Product testing, on this understanding, performs essentially the same function for households as it does for business and the state. Businesses and state organizations test in order to monitor the quality of the goods and materials they procure, to ensure that resources have been used in an eficient manner. Likewise, for households, testing provides information to assist them in making rational decisions about resource allocation.
But drawing this parallel between households and firms raises a question: What output does the household seek to maximize? One account of what it is that buying units are trying to maximize could be derived from economist Alfred Marshall’s (2013) concept of the consumer surplus. The consumer surplus is the diference between what a buyer would have been prepared to pay for a good, and the actual price of the good.27 In textbook economics, the aggregate consumer surplus for a given good is represented by the area below the demand curve and above the point of price equilibrium. Consumers whose demand lies in that area would have paid more for the good than its equilibrium price, so when they buy at that price, they, as it were, pocket the diference (measured in virtual money terms). Another way of putting this is that their subjective valuation of the good is higher than the objective price it sells at—its market price. A household can be construed as attempting to maximize its total consumer surplus over the basket of goods that it purchases, and the degree to which it is spending eficiently can in theory be measured by the size of its consumer surplus. Testing then gives households information they can use to come up with accurate valuations of goods. However, the consumer surplus interpretation assumes to an implausible degree that consumers know with some precision what their subjective money valuation of a good is, and, further, that this maps onto its utility for them.
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Time for Things