I find the expected quality of a slave who was sold was just 61 percent of the quality of his unsold cousin.
Here is much more, thanks to Eric Crampton for the pointer.
Adverse selection of slaves
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Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have the same problem when they going hiring in Bangladesh, India, etc.
In the villages the recruiters visit the families have realized you put forward the weakest son or daughter.
To Jason and anyone else who would like to read the paper “The Dynamics of Adverse Selection in the Market for Slaves”, I hope to get a working paper version up on my website in the near future.
One can only wonder about adverse selection of Africans who were captured or sold into slavery by their peers… will have to endow the Larry Summers chair of politically incorrect studies to find out.
How can you know that two slaves are “identical” in expected quality? If the assumption of equal quality is based on family relations (all slaves in one family are of equal quality) then that’s just stupid.
Also, are we talking physical quality? A smart slave might be seen as a negative. A really dumb slave, of course, might be discounted too. I have no idea how slave markets rated the intelligence of a slave for sale, let alone what the optimum intelligence level would be. I figure a lot of people would want the biggest, strongest slaves. But does that mean intelligence was completely ignored?
Anyway, even if there are lists of physical attributes of slaves and the prices for which they were sold, that doesn’t mean you could say two slaves with equal attributes on paper are equivalent in expected quality. And certainly you can’t assume such an equivalence based on two slaves being related to each other.
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