Tip to DACO: Reducing Corporate-Consumer Information Asymmetry (2)*
The vast engine of capitalism consists of exchanges, exchanges between consumers and businesses or between businesses. A consumer typically provides money in exchange for business products and/or services. The "value" of money, as the renown sociologist Georg Simmel once wrote, consists in its abstraction of value, or money's ability to be exchanged for any goods and services. The problem in this exchange system, which increasingly relies in a second order abstraction known as 'credit', is that a corporation can obtain the creditworthiness of the consumer immediately, but the consumer cannot obtain a 'product/service worthiness' of the corporation. (Some might argue that stock values provide such an indicator, but this measure is not only irrational but also is principally an indicator of expected income--something entirely different from the actual quality of the goods and services provided. A 17th century medical quack could have a high stock value selling what are essentially worthless goods.) A comparison of the two quickly reveals what is missing, and further demonstrates how the cards are not evenly stacked in consumer-corporation information and financial exchanges.
If you (the consumer) take a look at the Departamento de Asuntos del Consumidor (DACO) web-page, you can in fact obtain a list of the number of complaints filed against a given company per region. (On the left-hand menu, press on "Fichero de DACO"). It provides the number of complaints for a given company. However, if we compare this to consumer credit reports, such as those by EQUIFAX, TRANSUNION or EXPERIAN, we notice a number of glaring differences--the most prominent of which companies are not universally compared and assigned an index figure, akin to a consumer's credit score. Another glaring difference is that the DACO information is not historical, and their lists provide no information as to the number of complaints filed per year nor a brief description of the complaint's nature. (A historical list would be useful in order to identify improvement or decays in the quality of corporate services/products.) They are not easily searchable, nor have they been placed in a global comprehensive list; companies categorized by sector, so they could be more easily comparable, are similarly not included. We might also note that DACO does not list companies that have NOT been queried--a list that could easily be generated by cross-referencing the full business list at the Puerto Rico State Department. Finally, the lists do not include when they were created, nor what time period they exactly cover.
The lists generated by DACO in Puerto Rico or any US state and/or nation are extremely important because they provide a real measure of consumer dissatisfaction, in contrast to so much 'internet information' which is so often spurious and computer generated. It is very costly to take time away from work to go to a DACO hearing, which might last the better part of a workday, or more in some cases. A consumer willing to undergo the travesty means that there is genuine dissatisfaction about a company's service and/or product DACO, and all other consumer protection agencies across the entire United States and/or World, should generate these corporate indexes to provide all consumers an immediate idea of whom they are dealing with.--lists which should be immediately accessible on the internet. (Including information from the judicial system, such as the number of court cases and their description, would also be useful.) Such lists are instantaneously generated on exchange websites such as EBAY or AMAZON. Also, such lists already exist with regard to sexual criminals, as pointed out by Adolfo Krans, commentator in the show "Fuego Cruzado" of RadioIsla 1320 AM. The idea should be generalized into the 'real world' of daily commercial transactions.