It isn't about supply and demand at all, but about another, even more basic, economic concept: incentives, and a second relatively modern economic concept, info

It isn't about supply and demand at all, but about another, even more basic, economic concept: incentives, and a second relatively modern economic concept, information asymmetries.[1] Over-summarising and over-simplifying:- "Third-party service providers are incentivised to minimise their costs. If their clients cannot assess the quality of their service and/or end-users cannot reward or penalise them based on the quality of the services, then quality is poor, because it is cheaper to not provide services and later argue about it than to provide the service. Third party deficiencies/misbehaviour get so bad sometimes that there are no gains from trade and occasional losses. "Internally, inside companies, the incentives may be to act similarly to third-parties, or they may not. This depends on "culture"." And here the essay would be improved with an analysis of the compnents of "culture" that matter. It talks about trustworthiness of company leadership, but that is only one factor, surely. 1. Akerlof's "Market for Lemons" paper is the seminal one here.