The Market for Lemons cars, the dearth of formal credit markets in developing countries, and the difficulties that the elderly encounter in buying health insurance. However, not all players in a given market will follow the same rules or have the same aptitude of assessing quality. So there will always be a distinct advantage for some vendors to offer low-quality goods to the less-informed segment of a market that, on the whole, appears to be of reasonable quality and have reasonable guarantees of certainty. This is part of the basis for the idiom buyer beware. This is likely the basis for the idiom that
The Child Buyer 1961 National Book Award for Fiction. The Child Buyer The Child Buyer is John Hersey's 1960 novel about a project to engineer super-intelligent persons for a project whose aim is never definitely stated. Told entirely in the form of minutes from a State Senate Standing Committee, it relates the story of the appearance and efforts of a mysterious stranger in the small town of Pequot, and the repercussions of his attempt to buy a boy, Barry Rudd. The novel is primarily a satire on the school system, although it also posits questions about intelligence, the validity of intelligence/personality tests, and