I spoke with a lot of wedding industry veterans, as well as economists who study other markets where consumers frequently feel gouged, thanks to high search costs and informational asymmetries (health care, funerals). They told me the wedding industry’s dysfunction is a product of its highly bespoke services — and, as a result, greater transparency might not bring down prices anyway.

David M. Wood, president of the Association of Bridal Consultants, said part of the problem is that most brides are first-time shoppers. They are less informed about what a “fair” price is, or how long it should take to discover prices. (If you just spent two hours going through different bouquet and centerpiece pricing options at one florist, you might assume that it will take the same amount of time at other vendors and decide it’s too much of a hassle to shop around.) Because this event is (ideally) once in a lifetime, that also means that vendors can appeal to consumers’ sentimentality, urging them not to cheap out on the “most important” day of their lives. Because of similar concerns about guilt-tripping salespeople, the Federal Trade Commission requires funeral homes to provide its bereaved customers with an itemized price list.

Many in the wedding industry wielded this once-in-a-lifetime logic, explaining to me that wedding services are not standardized enough to create a meaningful price aggregator. With books, there’s a single bar code for each product, but it’s hard to do apples-to-apples pricing comparisons between wedding bands or photographers. This argument isn’t incredibly compelling. After all, I can see prices for highly differentiated food-delivery options on sites like Seamless. Locality, a start-up, has been collecting and publishing a menu of prices for services usually considered highly nonstandardized, like massages, day care and dentist visits. Creating something similar for wedding services should not be insurmountably difficult.

But even if some company swooped in and lowered search costs, that doesn’t necessarily mean that prices would fall as a result. Vendors could counteract the decrease in search costs by finding ways to make prices more difficult to compare — something known as “obfuscation,” studied by the M.I.T. economists Glenn Ellison and Sara Fisher Ellison. Sellers could obfuscate prices by giving different product names to an identical item, depending on which store is selling it, as the mattress industry has been accused of doing. Or they might lower prices for the specific keyword consumers search for, but then compensate with hidden fees or required add-on purchases. Many New York venue-based caterers quote a price per guest in the form of “[price] plus plus,” as in “$180 plus plus,” with one “plus” referring to taxes and the other “plus” referring to a “service” or “administrative” fee, which ranges somewhat arbitrarily from 18 to 25 percent, depending on the venue. This makes it very difficult to compare prices even when they’re aggregated side by side — similar to the rise of baggage fees on airlines in the age of Orbitz.

Ultimately, it may be that prices are not the primary attribute upon which people are searching for wedding vendors. By way of analogy, even if notoriously opaque health-care providers started posting prices upfront, patients still wouldn’t all flock to the lowest-cost brain surgeon. When it comes to services like weddings and delicate operations, consumers typically care about other qualities more, and so providing more price transparency might not change consumers’ choices.