Over the last two decades, prices in higher education have grown more quickly than prices in almost any other sector of the economy. Tuition inflation has been extensively examined. The examinations, however, have focused on a narrow set of explanations, none of which has revealed obvious opportunities for policy interventions that would slow this trend at a reasonable cost. All these are relevant factors, but they approach the issue only from the supply side. These studies neglect to deal with this question: Why has pressure from the market failed to mitigate these effects, as would normally happen in competitive markets for other products and services? In this report, four other possible demand-side explanations for tuition increases will be discussed: (1) Poor information on the value of different colleges and majors and the "Golden Ticket" fallacy, in which aspiring students seemingly overvalue the return of a college degree; (2) The opaque system of pricing that makes comparison-shopping for college difficult and expensive; (3) Geographic constraints of aspiring students and the resulting implications on competition; and (4) Regulation preventing lower-cost alternative business models to enter the marketplace to compete with existing traditional providers.