Fantabulous Fable Forest

Bedtime Stories you Should Read to

your Boss

Peacocks do it tooIn the Fantabulous Fable Forest there is a market. At the entrance there was a big warning sign. It said “Seller (and buyer) be ware”.

It’s because some sellers sold “lemons”. No, not the fruit. A “lemon” is a car that looks ok but breaks down a day later.

John the Rat sells life insurance. Animals that buy life insurance lie. Buyers lie to John about their smoking habits, use of condoms, and wearing a helmet while biking.

So it’s not only sellers that lie and sell lemons. Buyers hide things too.

. That’s why they added “(and buyer)”. As we shall see, they took the warning sign down. Here is why. If animals in the marketplace lie to each other you get unfair trading. True. a. Had the buyers known, they would not have bought the bad car. b. John would not have sold life insurance to sneaky smokers. The information is unfairly shared. Or in a big word “asymmetric”. You can call it lying. But lying is not the only source of unfairness. Sometimes it turns out to be too hard or too expensive to check the truth. Some stall owners, for instance, said that their washing powder was better. But buyers had to test the same cloth/spot combination to proof that. That is very hard and unpractical.

But unfairness has been solved. Almost. In the fable Forest, that is.

The animals took a solution from the yearly barn-dance. You see, all animals need to find a dancing partner that fits. That means partners have to check out each others qualities. Courting has looks a lot like buying a product.

Male suitors lie about their quality to get better female mates. They sometimes fake. Females therefore take a long time choosing. But even then some things females want from a partner stay hidden. These things are to expensive or to tedious to find out. For the female that is. So. She makes the males pay!