A market-for-lemons exercise — choose who to "buy" under deliberately incomplete information
13 March 2028
Nothing to prepare — the personas and their partial information sheets are handed out in the room. Resist the urge to Google what a real used-car lot looks like; the metaphor works better if you stay suspicious on priors alone.
Given a lot of fictional personas, each with a few visible attributes and several hidden ones, choose who you’d pair with, then compare notes with someone who saw a different subset of the same lot. The reveal at the end shows why the average “car on the lot” looked worse than the average car in the population — the mechanism, not just the moral.
If you found yourself reasoning “the fact that they’re still available is itself information,” you’ve derived adverse selection from the exercise rather than being told about it — which is the point.
SLOP2470 — Tutorial 4 handout
Monday 13 March 2028
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.