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But it is a market failure. The market for television shows is very far from perfectly competitive. The products are very differentiated, and there are only a

But it is a market failure. The market for television shows is very far from perfectly competitive. The products are very differentiated, and there are only a few companies providing the products. But the differentiation is really what matters in this case. As much as everyone hates loud commercials, channels can't actually gain significant viewership by quieting them down--no one is going to watch a drama with quiet commercials when they really want to be watching the football game with loud commercials. This means that there's no incentive for a channel to piss off their advertisers by doing this on their own. This is what governments are for--mandating the socially optimal strategy when the dominant strategy is something else.

jerf 16y ago
Actually, I don't think that's the source of the market failure. The source of the market failure is that there is no real feedback to the advertisers when the recipients are disgruntled or annoyed. The only people that matter are the Nielson raters, and I don't think there's a slot on their forms for being annoyed by volume. If advertisers saw a big dip every time the commercials came on, and could ask the customers why, and then could run an experiment with more level volume and find out people don't tune out so quickly, they could learn and the market could correct, but due to the nature of the technology not a single step of the requisite path actually existed 20 years ago, and still mostly not today.