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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

If there exist two pathways:

   1. Regulated, standardized
   2. Less regulated alternative
Which sort of companies are going to dominate in #2?

It's not going to be the ones that could have gone with #1, but decided not to for reasons. It's going to be a lot of companies that couldn't go with #1.

Which will drag down the median of #2, which will increase the cost of using it (because everyone will assume you're a scam by default), which will decrease its attractiveness and cause even more companies who can to pursue #1, GOTO 10.




um, lemon markets don't get fixed by simple regulation.

A seller has a motivation to sell which the buyer doesn't have direct access to: "I'm moving, need to sell my car"; "I get a new car every year, sell my old one"; "this car has tons of problems". The buyer's motivation is clear, "I want a good car for the price".

Since the market is a mix of lemon cars and good cars, the prices are somewhere in between. If the prices for good cars reflect lemons, the guy selling will say "I can't get enough for my car, I'll buy a new car every two years." The guys with the lemons still want to sell their cars. Now there are fewer good cars in the pool, and prices drop even more.

Now the guy who is moving will try to find somebody in his family he can sell it too, but the lemon guys still want to sell theirs.

This is why a brand new car loses so much value the minute you drive it off the lot. It's not a problem that can be completely solved with regulation; although some of the large players, like rental car companies, can be more easily regulated to not roll their odometers back, keep repair records, etc. However, they still get caught cheating.


Lemon markets can be fixed by regulation, because regulation effectively sets a floor to cheating.

And it's cheating (or buyer perception of cheating) that increases the discount the lemon market takes to true value, which leads to lemons dominating non-lemons in that market.

The more you can do to keep lemons out of a market via regulation, the less of a discount the buyer will demand relative to true value.


I would like to not that you didn't suggest any regulations, you just professed faith in them.

you can't have a law that people can't sell property, it's what property is, that which's ownership can be transferred. People with lemons always want to sell them, they are always in the market, always bringing prices down. You cannot create a perfect information marketplace through regulation, though you can improve it, for example major insurance incidents.




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