Adverse Selection Pricing

Mechanism

Adverse selection pricing describes the market phenomenon where price discovery is distorted by asymmetric information between informed and uninformed traders. In decentralized finance and crypto derivative markets, liquidity providers often adjust their quotes to compensate for the higher probability of trading against participants possessing superior predictive data. This protective adjustment effectively shifts the expected loss onto the market maker, which manifests as widened bid-ask spreads or increased slippage costs for standard participants.