Wesabe: Your Money. Your Community.

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s book Freakonomics is well-known as an introduction to actually interesting and useful microeconomic views on the world — not like that “rational actor” nonsense they fed you in college. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and have appreciated seeing a boom in livelier economics writing in its wake. It almost feels as though economics has become hip or something — quite a turn.

I was surprised, though, when I read this section from chapter two, which talks about the imbalance of information between real estate agents, and the home buyers and sellers who rely on agents to represent their interests:

It is common for one party to a transaction to have better information than another party. In the parlance of economists, such a case is known as an information asymmetry. We accept as a verity of capitalism that someone (usually an expert) knows more than someone else (usually a consumer). But information asymmetries everywhere have in fact been mortally wounded by the Internet.

Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hand of those who have it into the hands of those who do not. Often [...] the information existed but in a woefully scattered way. (In such instances, the Internet acts like a gigantic horseshoe magnet waved over an endless sea of haystacks, plucking the needle out of each one.) [...] The Internet has accomplished what no consumer advocate could: it has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public.

In the specific case of real estate agents, I posted a few weeks ago about how true this is — the Internet has been doing an excellent job of connecting home buyers and sellers to information they previously would not have had, at least not easily. Yet, I think Levitt and Dubner dramatically overstate the “mortal blow” information asymmetries have been dealt. It seems to me, instead, that specific industries have been signficantly changed, but that the overall consumer experience is still the same, and that many industries haven’t been affected, or hardly at all.

Unquestionably, it is much easier to compare prices for products — new products through review sites, like Amazon and Shopzilla, and used products particularly through eBay. Likewise, specific markets, like cars, travel, and real estate, have seen significant changes in their pricing power through the development of Internet companies such as Edmunds, Orbitz, Farecast, Zillow, and Redfin. Some very general review sites, such as Yelp and Judy’s Book, are taking on five-star reviews of local businesses of a wide variety.

But does this add up to a mortal blow for information asymmetry? Let’s take a look at a specific example for a moment: auto repair. Yes, the Internet can help you get a new car with much better pricing information than ever before. But what about getting your car serviced? Assume the warranty has expired, and you actually have a choice of where to take your car for service — the dealership, or an independent shop. Does the Internet — search engines, or specific sites — make it possible for you to find a good auto shop without having to be a car expert? Can you compare the price and satisfaction you should expect?

I looked up a BMW auto shop in Berkeley, California (where I live) by the name of Bavarian Professionals. (As it turns out, they’re a fantastic shop, and I highly recommend them if you’re in the area.) I wondered what I could find out about this shop if I didn’t already know they do excellent work:

• A site called “Mechanic-Review” had one three-star rating and a short review
• Insider Pages had two five-star ratings with reviews
• Tribe.net had one five-star rating and a review
• i-Rate (what a name!) had one five star rating (but no review)
• Yahoo! Local had one five-star rating and a review
• A local parents’ discussion board, Berkeley Parents’ Network, had two short reviews from 2002; and
• A Google search on ‘bmw auto shop berkeley‘ (that is, looking for the concept rather than the shop in particular) returned the same general list of sites, and no ads that were helpful.

Almost all of these sites also included the address and phone number for the shop, and a couple showed a map. The Better Business Bureau did not publish information on the Internet about this business, and if there are other relevant sites with good information about them, I couldn’t find them. These searches did turn up some other information — for instance, the New York Times wedding announcement for the general manager (belated congrats, Mr. Sears!) — performing, as Freakonomics claimed, as a giant magnet for any and all information about this shop. But none of these searches helped me make a better decision or comparison between Bavarian Professionals and the dealership — the only comparison I was able to make was using five-star ratings scattered across many sites.

So, what did the Internet get us, for all of our research on how to get our car fixed? An address, a bunch of stars and a few short reviews.

In this example, pricing information is completely absent. Not one of the reviews or ratings would give you any information around which to plan a budget or compare prices between shops. The information that is available — star ratings and reviews — only comes from those consumers so motivated to rant or rave about a business that they’ll take the time to find a good site for doing so, and then to voice their opinion. While each time I’ve been to Bavarian Professionals they seem to be servicing 10 or 20 cars, the largest number of reviews I could find on any site, even Yahoo!, was two.

Compare this to many of the other purchases you might make as a consumer: housing, groceries, restaurant meals, medical services, and so on. If you apply for a rental apartment, think about how much information the landlord can get on you (through your credit report and the like) versus how much you can get on them. Think about how much a grocery chain knows about your buying habits if you pay with your credit card, versus how much you know about them and their pricing. It seems like you should know more, since there are far fewer grocery stores than there are consumers who shop at grocery stores, but no. Consumers have no way to aggregate and compare information about our purchases for nearly all of the money we spend every day.

So, I don’t buy it — I don’t think the Internet, nor any site on the Internet, has yet dealt a mortal blow to information asymmetry. Businesses have access to far more, better structured, professionally collated information about you as a consumer — your credit rating, your salary history, demographic profiles of you, warranty cards you’ve completed, and so on — than you have access to about them as a business by a long shot, and that has not materially changed for nearly all industries. Pricing information is indeed flowing more freely, but satisfaction measurements are relegated to the five-star review Amazon perfected a decade ago, and those measurements have advanced no further. We need more.

I was already far down the road with Wesabe before I read Freakonomics, so I was surprised to read the paragraphs quoted above. Levitt and Dubner are definitely right about their general characterization of the power the Internet can bring to consumers, and should bring to consumers. I disagree with them only as to whether that power exists for consumers today. The raw material exists, but the “gigantic horseshoe magnet” doesn’t just appear — we have to make it happen, together.

One of the early seeds for Wesabe was a conversation I had several years ago about credit card fraud detection. If you’ve ever gotten a call from your bank or credit card company asking whether some of your recent purchases were legitimate, you’ve seen the effects of fraud detection. These companies run increasingly sophisticated programs to find purchases that look “fishy” for one reason or another. Maybe a purchase took place in one city while you were withdrawing cash in a city across the country. Maybe your card was suddenly used to purchase ten cells phones at once. The fraud detection programs look for patterns of “normal” purchases, and try to find cases where something just doesn’t look right. This helps you, and it helps the card companies (since they bear most of the responsibility for fraud).

Original photo by Brett Lider.

The conversation I had was with two people who write this kind of software. They were talking about how intricate the fraud detection programs had become over the years, and how much more effective it has gotten. “It’s really interesting stuff,” one of them said, “to see how patterns form in people’s spending. Patterns of purchases speak volumes.”

At the time I didn’t reply, but what I was thinking was, so, what else can you do with that software? If the patterns of “normal” purchases are that interesting, could you get a lot more out of them than just fraud detection?

Of course, banks and credit card companies do just that, and use that data to help set your credit limits and offer you new financial products. Where my thought led me, though, was to the idea of pattern-detection software that could help consumers. Some of the ideas you’ll see in Wesabe are simple beginnings of that process. Now that we’ve been running our software for a few months, I agree with the fraud detection developers: you can learn a lot from looking at patterns of people’s purchases, and I’m happy to say that there’s a huge amount in that data that can help consumers get more for their money.

After all, shouldn’t there be more tools that try to do just that? Help consumers — really help people with their money? It astonishes me sometimes that there aren’t.

Update: There’s a good story on fraud detection software in The Economist this week.

When I tell parents that I’m working on a site to help people with money, one of the first things I often hear is, “Oh, great, I’ll sign my child up so they don’t make the mistakes I made!” One such parent forwarded me this news item today: High school dropouts earn far less money.

Adults who don’t finish high school in the U.S. earn 65 percent of what people who have high school degrees make, according to a new report comparing industrialized nations.

These articles — and similar ones on retirement planning, compound interest, and flossing — all seem to hit parents in the same place. If only I’d known that then!

There’s a fantastic impulse in wanting the best for the next generation, and I’m sure that Wesabe will be a big help for any teenagers or young adults who decide they want to participate. I’m not sure, though, if I would have joined myself at that age. If I’m at all good with money now, it’s because I’ve fought for many years to get better at it, and that effort would not have come naturally while I was in high school. Certainly the best way to keep me from joining would have been a suggestion I do so from the adults in my life! It may be that different kinds of sites are needed for different ages, just as MySpace tends to serve high school-age people and Facebook is more for people in college. But maybe not — Flickr (one of our favorite topics of discussion at Wesabe) seems to span a lot of age groups.

We’ll see what happens. We’re designing, though, to make the community as good as we can make it for anyone who decides to join.