Mimicry/false signaling/bluffing (look more dangerous, look inpalatable, distract attention, attract prey), camouflage (avoid being preyed), brood paratism (cokoos get parenting for free).
None of them involve deceiving partners into pretending higher level of fitness.
Thinking about this it becomes a little clearer why this is.
When you're buying a sofa the seller usually doesn't buy a sofa made by you. So there is an assymmetry. The sofa dealer not only monopolizes most information about the deal (factual quality, costs; competitors are shared information). Also, the dealer can influence what you think. Economies of scale at play both in advertising and production.
Secondly, only if those two sofas you exchanged were to be used to produce the next generation of sofas and only if those newly merged sofa designs would be the sole base of contemporary sofa design would this comparison hold.
Then it becomes clear that if both parties engage in deceiving each other the species as the hypthetical owner of all evolving sofa designs must lose.