What are businesses motivated to do?
I mentioned earlier that the system of exchange produces structural motivations - that is, once we imagine a system of widespread exchange, actors who want to survive or thrive in it are motivated to behave in a certain way. The most basic of these is the motivation to accrue exchange capacity. There are a variety of ways that this motivation is enacted by businesses, however; some of these are within regulatory boundaries, and others are deemed problematic and have regulatory boundaries placed on them.
Innovation and efficiency
The two classic and ideal ways that this motivation is enacted is through innovation and efficiency. These are often seen as the core of economic competitiveness, where competition is seen as the engine that drives the economy towards improvement. Businesses want either more customers, which will increase their income, or for customers to pay higher prices. Innovation can create product improvements, and superior products can both attract new customers or justify a business pricing their product at a premium because it is better than the products of competitors. Efficiency can produce lower-cost products that either allow a greater margin of profit or attract in more customers who are not willing to pay a higher price.
Generally, product innovation and increased efficiency are seen as benefits (though note the tension of the paradox of efficiency when it is applied to labour). A lot fo quality of life improvements are enabled either because of technological improvements from a competitive market, or efficiency improvements that requires less resource use and results in increased abundance in some context. Some people might claim that competition is the basis of all true innovation and efficiency improvements, but there is a lot of evidence that this is not the case (some of which I will come back to). Most economists won't make such a dramatic claim, even if they acknowledge that competition can motivate innovation and efficiency improvements.
Customer relations
The desire for a strong and increasing customer base, one of the paths to exchange capacity accrual, is through good customer relations - personable staff interactions, responsiveness of the company, customer satisfaction with products, a robust complaints process, product guarantees, ethical business practices, and so on. Some businesses adopt these practices and find great success in their implementation, building a good reputation and a strong legacy.
Quality efficiency or corner-cutting
In contrast, some businesses aim for a type of by scaling back the quality of the product. This is not necessarily a deceptive or problematic business practice in a legal or ethical sense, but simply a factor of consideration for consumers in a market: for example, some consumers may go for the lower quality product knowing that it is of poorer quality simply because it is cheaper, and some consumers would not have access to the product at all on a market if the lower quality version were not produced.
In other cases the quality reduction is not related to the core product, such as when a company which provides a service reduces the number of contact staff so that customers who face a problem have longer waits before they are attended to.
When a spate of companies across a market all look for quality efficiency in order to make savings, then there is a "race to the bottom", and quality reduction is copied across the entire industry. This might be the case because the context of the industry has changed - perhaps a new type of competitor has entered the space or the basic costs have increased - or it might be because one company took this route to make savings and other companies saw that customers responded to it and worked to reduce their own costs.
In some cases, however, the reduction of quality means that the product is more likely to be faulty or unsafe. If there are less testers, poorer materials, less maintenance of the production process, rushed jobs, or similar corner cutting, it can be the case that more faulty products make it out to consumers or, worse, that an entire product line is produced with an unidentified fault.
Continual sales
In some ways, a business is like a person in that it wants to survive. Perhaps this is the case because the people in the business rely on it in order to survive themselves, or perhaps because they have a lot of debt or investment associated with the business.
There are two ways to look at businesses in this case. The first is a business that does a particular job, such as making shoes or lightbulbs. Such a business produces a good to the extent that the market demands such a good, and tries to innovate and create efficiencies in competition with other businesses in the market. But, if the good no longer has a market - that is, if people no longer need shoes or lightbulbs - the business would wind up.
The second is a business that is a "vehicle" for the livelihood of the people within it. Such a business would produce shoes and lightbulbs to the extent that the market demanded it, but would then transition to a new product if that demand started to dry up. The business isn't necessarily interested in staying "true" to the type of product that it has traditionally made, but is looking to survive in a changing market.
To some extent the distinction between these businesses is purely one of labels. If the shoe business winds up, the owners might invest in a new business and hire some people from the previous business and some new people. Alternatively, if shoes are on the way out, the shoe business might pivot to making a new product, with the owners investing in the transition, firing some of the existing staff who won't be a good fit for the new direction of the company, and hire some new people with necessary skills for the change. The same shift, roughly, has occurred.
In the short term, businesses are more like the former than the latter. They make a certain set of products and they have invested in the production line and staff to make that product. Transitions are expensive. So the shoe company, in the short term, largely just makes shoes and largely only thinks of making shoes, and the lightbulb company largely only thinks of making lightbulbs.
In order to survive, companies need to continually sell products. If the shoe company stops selling shoes, it won't survive. If it sells too few shoes, it won't survive. It needs to sell shoes and, while in the long term it can think about selling something else, it really needs to sell shoes and only shoes at the moment. And it would be a problem if, for some reason, nobody needed shoes anymore.
This means that it would be a problem if the shoe company or the lightbulb company completely satisfied demand. If everyone had long-lasting, good quality shoes or lightbulbs, then these companies would suddenly find that they had no demand, no more customers, no sales. They would have put themselves out of business. And while this situation is a little bit exaggerated and silly, the general principle is a motivator for various business practices.
One is to create new demand for a product by releasing a new, updated version regularly. Fashion is a famous example, where, although the clothes from last season probably haven't fallen apart in that short span on time, they are seen as outdated and new, innovative trends are introduced to entice people to buy more clothes. Shoes, phones, toys, cars - there are a lot of areas where demand is created for a new trend of product that behaves in a similar or identical manner to the previous iteration, but is fashionably different.
The other major practice is planned obsolescence. This is when a product is made to fail after a certain period of time, so that the consumer will need to buy a new one. Lightbulbs, for example, have by some companies been designed to fail even though higher quality lightbulbs which last longer are able to be manufactured; however, sellingthose lightbulbs would reduce the overall demand for lightbulbs, which is potentially problematic for a company that sells lightbulbs.
In a similar fashion, theories have been put forward about Google's search quality, the suggestion being that Google's search quality has been deliberately lowered so that people using it are more likely to try searching twice - and be served twice as many ads, where Google makes the majority of its revenue.
Demand construction
Similar to fashion trends are other types of demand construction. This is where a business has a product, but not a set of consumers who are willing to buy it. The classical market logic is that businesses will only make products that consumers will want to buy - that either consumers are already demanding, which solves some problem consumers know they have, or which solves some problem that consumers didn't know they have - or that the business will fail. But there is another option: a business can make a product that consumers don't want and then convince consumers that they have a problem that needs solving with their product. Perhaps the most famous example is Listerine, which was a surgical anti-septic that was mareketed as a floor-cleaner and a cure to gonorrhea, but which didn't sell well at all. It was re-targeted at the condition of chronic halitosis, which, until the advertising campaign that built awareness that bad breath was a social problem, had not been a social problem at all.
Deception
A common consequence of the motivation to accrue exchange capacity is deception. Businesses can advertise product quality that isn't met, promote product capabilities that don't exist, or only deliver partial products. The problem is fairly endemic, but was historically more dramatic: food quality controls were introduced to respond to deceptive food practices that were unsafe, as well as product warranty laws, as well as truth-in-advertising laws. Listerine, for example, was called out for deception over its various claims that it could cure certain conditions - most of which were false (in fact, many mouthwashes don't even fix bad breath).
For years, cigarette companies suppressed information that cigarettes are harmful for your health, and in 2015 Volkwagon produced fraudulent results regarding diesel emissions. Deception in marketing is so widespread that it is often expected from consumers.
Monopolisation and cartelisation
The two main ways to increase revenue for a business are to get more customers or to make more money off each customer. If possible, doing both is optimal when trying to accrue more exchange capacity. Two ways that this occurs are monopolisation and cartelisation.
In monopolisation, a company becomes the only company to sell a particular product or category of product, or, at least, the overwhelmingly dominant seller. In this circumstance, customers who need the good cannot realistically go to an alternative seller, and thus the business can charge an abnormally high price. Businesses can become monopolies through innovation, aggressive market tactics (like undercutting competitors until they are out of business), through mergers with other companies, or through regulatory capture. When mergers occur, it is often because the market is saturated and there is not much movement of consumers between competing businesses. Because businesses find it hard to draw in new customers, the only way to gain new customers is to buy or merge with other businesses that have cutomers. Regulatory capture can also cause monopolies by having industry figures sit on government regulatory boards and determine the standards for starting a business in that industry or for competing products, entrenching the existing businesses in a dominant position.
Cartelisation, on the other hand, is when businesses remain nominally separate, but work together instead of competing, either carving up territory or agreeing not to compete on price. The effect is similar to a monopoly, in that customers do not have any real alternatives, because the competing businesses have secretly organised to sell the same quality products at the same price.