@g It seems to me that this is kind of fine in all cases,as long as everybody does more or less the same thing, and preferably about everybody knows about the mechanism. So a situation in which everybody uses anchoring in the way you describe is sorta fine. The better solution that might work is if we coordinated (in practice enforced by government; in _actual_ practice politically infeasible) to always show products in random order. Unfortunately, it's much easier to get everyone to use the trick (self-interest doesn't need to be enforced, usually), and educate people about how it works – this mostly levels the playing field.

Since you are doing the educating with this post, hey, nice and thanks for the public service!

I'm much more worried about the very existence of advertisements as far as ethical concerns about marketing go.