Here's what I don't get. Why do a price match guarantee? Why not just price your items lower? Or do a "match" where you guarantee every item for 10 cents cheaper than your competitors?
MAD [1]. Price-match guarantees are meant to deter price competition. If you cut your price below a price-matching competitor's, the time you have the best price will be short. After that, less profit for everyone (assuming similar cost structures). If, on the other hand, you match, everyone keeps their market share and margins.
Price competition in a price-matching market happens when someone has lower costs. It also happens when someone uses cheap capital to buy market share, intending to make up for lower margins with volume, e.g. to cover fixed costs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
As consumers, absolutely we do. But the person asking the question asked why companies don't do that, and the answer is that it's a bad business decision for them.
The literature is mixed on the effects of price-matching guarantees [1][2]. The most compelling resolution I've read says "price-matching guarantees can facilitate monopoly pricing only if firms automatically match prices. If consumers must instead request refunds (thereby incurring hassle costs)...any increase in equilibrium prices due to firms’ price-matching policies will be small; often, no price increase can be supported" [3].
In any case, enforcing an automatic price-matching ban would be difficult. Would you prohibit firms from lowering their prices to match competitors'? If not, it would just take a few turns of the ratchet to send the message to would-be competitors (and consumers). Whether the consumer surplus from those ratchet turns are worth the enforcement cost is an open question.
[1] https://www.bauer.uh.edu/jhess/documents/10.pdf
[2] http://people.tamu.edu/~sjain/papers/published%20pmr%20paper...
[3] http://www.simon.rochester.edu/fac/SHAFFER/Published/Hassel%...
Couldn't you just make a law saying "price-match guarantees are illegal"? Firms who explicitly move prices to match each other is fine with me, but the match guarantee is problematic. It seems that your conclusion is that companies use matching guarantees to implicitly collude but that even if we got rid of this they would still collude. But we should still stamp out collusion wherever we see it even if that puts us in a whack-a-mole situation.
Same rules/ theory?
Basically you can have your cake and eat it too. (To some extent)
In order of easiest returns: "Sold and shipped by Amazon" -> eBay -> Amazon 3rd party vendors.
No? I'll stick to Amazon then.