历史与人物en.wikipedia.org
菲比斯卡特尔：计划性淘汰的诞生
Phoebus Cartel
2018 — 2021，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
维基百科条目，介绍 1920 年代由欧司朗、飞利浦、通用电气等灯泡厂商组成的 Phoebus 卡特尔。该组织通过统一标准并人为将灯泡寿命限制在约 1000 小时，被视为“计划性报废”的最早著名案例。
为什么经久不衰：它是计划性报废和行业合谋的经典历史案例，在产品寿命与可持续性讨论日益重要的今天依然常读常新。
HN 评论精选
以本地人视角揭示飞利浦既受爱戴又长期参与各种卡特尔的双重形象。
我住在飞利浦的家乡埃因霍温。这里的人非常爱飞利浦——整座城市因它而存在，公寓楼、餐厅、球场都以创始人命名，甚至有 CEO 的雕像。但飞利浦是骗子，20 世纪几乎所有臭名昭著的技术卡特尔里都有它的身影，从最初就在坑害消费者。我不明白人们怎么能这么轻易地洗白这些事。
skrebbel查看英文原文
I live in Eindhoven, home town of Philips, one of the members of this cartel. Philips is extremely loved here. They're the reason this city is a city at all, they're the reason we're a prosperous region with of lots of innovation (mostly hardware though, so not very HN-fashionable). We now have apartment buildings named after their founders ("Gerard", "Anton", etc), lunchrooms ("Meneer Frits"), the local football stadium & club are named after them, and so on. Statues. Statues! Not of a Great Leader back in some totalitarian past, but of CEOs! Imagine putting an enormous bronze Elon Musk at the SF Caltrain station square. That's Eindhoven. We love us our Philips. They were crooks. The amount of cartels Philips has been in is staggering. They've been working to screw over their customers since the very beginning. Look it up, any infamous technology cartel from the 20th century you can find, big chance Philips was on it. When cartels went out of vogue they lobbied for regulation with pretty much the same effect - Philips will do anything, legal or not, to keep their margins up. I really don't understand how easily people whitewash this shit.
反主流观点：短寿命灯泡在效率与寿命的权衡下可能反而符合消费者利益。
灯泡其实是卡特尔危害的糟糕例子。灯丝温度越高效率越高但寿命越短；对易更换的灯泡来说，省下的电费往往超过更频繁更换的成本，所以短寿命灯泡其实对消费者有利。消费者只对更换频率有直观感受，缺乏寿命和功耗的信息，因此无论动机如何，Phoebus 卡特尔反而在信息不对称下代表了公众利益。
spqr0a1查看英文原文
Light bulbs are a bad example of the dangers of cartels. Incandescent filaments are much more efficient at higher temperature but burn out quicker. In the common case, savings from reduced electricity cost more than offset the increased replacement rate for bulbs in accessible fixtures. Short-lived bulbs were good for the customers. In a market with perfect information people would have chosen them on their own. Unfortunately of 3 categories of information needed for an informed decision (lifetime, power usage, and light output) purchasers only had a good measure of how often they replaced bulbs. Usage patterns are too complex for improvements in a single bulb to be obvious on a power bill, and human brightness perception is roughly logarithmic so it’s not visually obvious how much brighter different bulbs are. Whether it was motivated by greed or not, the Phoebus cartel is an example of big business successfully advocating for the interests of the general public in the presence of information asymmetry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#Light_output_and_lifetime
指出计划性报废是经济激励结构的系统性问题，而非孤例。
相关条目：计划性报废。我认为当前经济体系并不追求产品最长寿命——只要不被抓到，让产品不那么耐用或刻意计划报废，对制造商反而更有利可图。
acd查看英文原文
Related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence I would argue that the current economic system does not plan for maximum longevity of products. Rather it can be more profitable for an manufacturer for planned obsolescence or simply make products which does not last that long. As long as they do not get caught that is.
分析卡特尔靠专利池维持壁垒，并指出标准化是其表面正当理由。
查资料看，创建 Phoebus 的理由是行业标准化（这也是今天灯泡口径和额定体系统一的原因），但他们显然越界谋取私利。卡特尔历史上很少能长期成功——新进入者总有降价动机，他们需要某种壁垒，这里靠的是专利池。IEEE Spectrum 有更详细的报道。
legitster查看英文原文
Reading up on it, it seems like the justification for creating Phoebus was to standardize the industry (it's the reason all of our lightbulbs today follow the same rating system and screw in the same way). But clearly they ran amok to serve their own interests. Cartels are very interesting: historically few are successful long term - there is too much incentive for newcomers to undercut prices. They need something to keep new entrants at bay. It seems like in this case they pooled their patents together. IEEE has a more detailed write-up: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
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