Your 401(k) and the Prison Commissary

A paragraph to ponder from the New York Times - - Orange is the New Green:

"As I listened to wardens explain their incentives, I kept feeling that there was something oddly familiar. Prison commissaries are simply one extreme example of an economic arrangement that I think of as the third-party decider. There are lots of businesses in which the person selecting a product or service is not the person who will actually use it. And these are often the more frustrating parts of our economy. Employees may be the end-users of 401(k) plans and health-insurance policies, but corporate human-resource managers are often the ones who decide which company — Fidelity, Vanguard, Charles Schwab — is able to offer those plans to employees. Years ago, I came across the materials that a few 401(k) companies used to market their services, and I was surprised by how much more space was devoted to how the providers could make life easier for the H.R. people who had to file all the paperwork than to the details that 401(k) end-users would actually care about, like the expenses that the funds charge."