Ineed examples of institutional inertia.?

Question

What are some examples of it?

and what is it?

Answer 1

General Motors
Woolworths

Answer 2

Well ... Lets pick on the car industry, for one ...

The car industries dawdled over mandatory seat belts for
close to a decade saying that people would refuse to buy
cars that had them because they would mess their clothing,
restrict their breating and they didn't want to pay the cost.

They also said that people would refuse to pay for small
gas efficient vehicles and fought every attempt to regulate
emission standards even though such things are now turning
out to be a sales advantage.

General Motors went so far as to Lease the "EV1", a purely
electric vehicle - many of the people who leased them wanted
to keep them but at the end of the experiment, GM made
everybody return them and then destroyed them.

The basically discovered that the battery technology
though primative at the time would completely undermine
all of the gasoline technology they had invested billions in.

Companies take the attitude "First make money, then
look around and see what's happening". Its completely
predictable, and very unfortunate.

Answer 3

First is institutional inertia. Employees have come to expect employers to offer some sort of health benefit and it’s one of the first things employees think about when evaluating jobs. Employers will likely continue to offer health benefits simply because employees expect the benefits.

Another reason employers will continue to offer health benefits, even without the tax benefit, is because it’s something that they can offer relatively cheaply, as opposed to having employees get their own insurance. This won’t be true in every case, to be sure, but in general employers will be able to buy insurance at a lower rate than employees can alone, therefore adding more value to a compensation package from the employee’s perpective at a relatively low cost to the employer.

Will the benefit of eliminating the propensity to over-consume that’s built into the tax code outweigh the costs of disintermediation and other considerations? I don’t know, but on its face it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to treat one form of income as preferable to another.

Example
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/12/the_new_plan_fo.html