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Adverse Selection

Due to differences in the information that buyers and sellers have, the efficient allocation of resources to the buy and sell market mechanism can be put out of kilter. And quality products can disappear from the market. A famous example of this is illustrated by the economist George Akerlof. He explains that care sale yards know best when it comes to whether or not a car has been in an accident or whether or not it will be have one. All the buyer has is the seller’s word, this is the assymetry of information. In this case the buyer will only purchase the vehicle for a lower price than the average between the cost of one thats been in an accident and one that hasn’t. The result is damaged vehicles are sold for more and quality vehicles are taken off the market by their owners. Due to the assymetry of information the used car market becomes flooded with damaged vehicles and quality vehicles decline and adverse selections are made.

Akerlof pointed out that quality assurances and brand chains or franchises peddled by car dealers rectify the information assymetry and they are giving back confidence to the customer. newsweek日本版１１７５号より

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection

We can apply this to iPhone apps that don’t stand out or sell well.
Price wars and apps that are just quick attempts at a few $$ are the norm and it’s difficult for high quality apps to get to the higher positions on the apple Top lists.
Customers rely heavily on those lists. There are various review sites around but their reliability is questionable. Potential buys look at those Top lists and purchase those apps because their on the list and therefor must be good. Review sites use affiliate programs and advertising to gain popularity and so of course review those apps that are in the Top lists or those that will almost definitely make it.
The point being, customers are getting a lot of information about products with questionable reputations.
You could call this, asymmetry of information.

.. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this.
Even though certain products are in the top lists, they live up to their net-wide reviews.

To combat this, we could consider quality assurance.
To examine quality, we first need to establish the “fairness” and “accuracy” ranges.

… As I was considering this, I realised there was such a system already in Facebook.
Living Social
Living Social appeared around spring and in 1 month went to 1,000,000 monthly active users. They cover not only iPhone apps, but cd’s, books and just about everything. It’s easy to operate, you can put it in your Facebook profile and people very quickly began categorising their collections. On a large social network, sharing this kind of info between friends is easy so it went viral very quickly.

living social
At TokyoCamp we sat next to http://www.rainbowapps.com/http://www.rainbowapps.com/. An iPhone dev co.
On their site you can add followers who you find trustworthy information-wise. If you have similar interests, they can become a valuable source.
You could equate it to real friends who always give you great info.

.. can we apply the same theory to social app design ..
No, this is the BASIS of social app design??

Social Appli ideas are in fimilar places maybe.
In society.