Comment on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:23:44 GMT

Regarding parallels between seduction and salesmanship, there is a recent interesting post on Overcoming Bias about the asymmetry between the behavior of buyers and sellers in a trade transaction: buyers tend to take a cautious, passive role, while sellers take an active, persuasive role.

I think that Hanson's signalling explanaition is wrong, but he is right to notice that this behavioral asymmetry exists.
My explanation is that this phenomenon is caused by information asymmetry: in a typical transaction, the seller has usually less uncertainty about the utility that they will get from the transaction than the buyer, since while both parties can evaluate the utility of money, the seller has usually better information about the object being sold than the buyer has.
Therefore, it makes sense for the risk averse buyer to adopt a cautious stance, creating incentive for the seller try to persuade them.

The more information asymmetry exists in a markert, the more manipulative pressure sales techniques we observe: used car salesmen get their reputation from the fact that the used car market is indeed a textbook example of high information asymmetry market.

Back to the seduction scene, it might make sense that in a typical club pickup scenario, men have less uncertainty about the utility of an encounter than women do: a man looking for a one-night stand may only care about (generalized) looks, which are easy to evaluate, while even a women looking for casual sex might be seeking for status, which is difficult to evaluate in strangers you just met, or she might be taking into account the risks of being raped, robbed or otherwise abused, or she might be unconsciously considering the risk of an unwanted pregnancy.

If that's the case, it might be explain why women tend to take a cautious passive role while men take a persuasive role, and may even resort to salemanship-like techniques.

Discuss