It is often good business practice to get multiple bids before signing a contract. Government procurement rules often require that multiple bids be solicited. Corporate law at times requires takeover targets to auction themselves to the highest bidder.
Why not require mandatory auctions as a paliative to some predatory lending problems?
A lender might face a heightened probability that its loan will be set aside if the lender cannot prove that the borrower was offered alternative loans from other lenders (or at least alternative lenders were give the chance to bid for the business).
The law would make give lenders the incentive to get borrowers to use lendingtree.com type services.
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There is a good reason for the rules you mention in the first paragraph which is that the people making the decisions (government bureaucrat) may be different from those who pay (taxpayer). This is not the case for individuals. In general, I think, it is difficult and often inefficient to try to protect people from their own bad decisions. That is not to say that governments should not work toward making information on merchants (including loan vendors) and their products as accessible as possible.
Also I would be hesitant to support any law which required individuals to shop around for anything (whether it be loans, cars, or toothpicks). Shopping is a cost and how much to do it is a deicsion best left to the individual. For example, when we last refinanced our house, it was only about 18 months after the previous re-finance. The first time we did it, I shopped around quite a bit. The second time we went straight back to our credit union. Probably an exhaustive search would brought us a slightly better deal, but I knew it was not likely to be worth the time.
How about allowing one to "auction" or tender their needfor loans or other goods/services?
Having a business sometimes puts you to the limits, specially when we talk about fundings. I see here an interesting approach regarding lenders and borrowers and i ask myself, why so much trouble, why people choose the hard way. The economical environment supports small business development through financial programs that make business loans affordable for many entrepreneurs. There is no need for "mandatory credit auction", things are kept simple.