ABSTRACT
Ideally, each and every consumer should be able to influence consumer policy. The most obvious mechanism for consumers to be able to express a preference is through the market mechanism. There are some innovative attempts to enable consumers to fashion the market, with ethical banking20 and eco-labelling21 being obvious examples, but these are exceptional instances of consumers attempting positively to influence the market. Of course, when consumers have bad experiences they often react in a negative fashion by ‘exiting’ the market, in the sense of not dealing with unsatisfactory traders in the future.22 When significant numbers of consumers behave in a similar manner, the cumulative affect may be sufficient to cause traders to alter their behaviour.23 This would only seem to be an appropriate solution for small, repeat purchases. When individual consumers have suffered large losses, they need to be able to ‘voice’ their concerns.24 Even for small repeat losses, it may not be sufficient to trust the market to rectify the situation through consumers choosing the ‘exit’ option. There may be sufficient consumers to keep unsatisfactory traders in business (if there is a rapid turnover in consumers, for example, in tourist resorts or the deficiencies are difficult to detect), or the market effect of exit may take some time to have an impact on the trader.
