Here's my motivating story: I was recently doing end-of-year financial management tasks on the Japan side and applied for A from a Japanese bank. B is, in this case, strictly superior to A along all product dimensions, and more lucrative for the bank, while lower cost to me.
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I was unaware of the existence of B until a few minutes ago, a few days after I had applied to A. I Googled A and ended up on a page saying "Hey FYI here is the dissiderata for when B is better." That decision tree is decidable given information on the application for A.
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Why. The. Heck. Would you not have your application say "Hey Patrick let's do you a solid here and *cough* triple the LTV of this interaction." Now I have a pretty good hypothesis for why this is true for a Japanese bank, specifically, and it is org tech dysfunction.
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But I have had this argument at US tech companies, too, and *there* the argument is usually someone with an engineering background on the product team saying "Well if the customer *wanted* B they would be trying to buy B but they're trying to buy A, so we should respect that."
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And respect that! Sure! If I tell you "Actually no your math is wrong and/or your assumptions do not account for my edge case and/or I enjoy paying more for inferior services because my name is The Joker" then let the transaction go ahead w/o more than a click or sentence.
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But crikey, this feels like a really sucky user experience to be actually living right now. Fixing it commits me to canceling one transaction and starting another (very much a timesuck over a holiday) and now every time I use A I'll be fuming at poor decisions at the bank.
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And right now you're asking "Hey Patrick how can a product both be lower cost to you *and* more lucrative to the bank" and the answer is "This is common in finance but a detailed explanation makes A, B, and the bank easily guessable and tweeting those has non-zero social cost."
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End of conversation
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I knew it in another context as “honest broker”. So sad we have to qualify “broker”, but then the answer is in the question.
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When honesty = profit ...
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