Related papers: Credibility in Credence Goods Markets
We study the economic interactions among sellers and buyers in online markets. In such markets, buyers have limited information about the product quality, but can observe the sellers' reputations which depend on their past transaction…
We are concerned with the problem of introducing credibility type information into reasoning systems. The concept of credibility allows us to discount information provided by agents. An important characteristic of this kind of procedure is…
In online marketplaces, customers have access to hundreds of reviews for a single product. Buyers often use reviews from other customers that share their type -- such as height for clothing, skin type for skincare products, and location for…
Before purchase, a buyer of an experience good learns about the product's fit using various information sources, including some of which the seller may be unaware of. The buyer, however, can conclusively learn the fit only after purchasing…
We study expert advice under reputational incentives, with sell-side equity research as the lead application. A long-lived analyst receives a continuous private signal about a binary payoff and recommends a risky (Buy) or safe action.…
I study a model of advisors with hidden motives: a seller discloses information about an object's value to a potential buyer, who doesn't know the object's value or how profitable the object's sale is to the seller (the seller's motives). I…
A seller offers an asset in a decentralised market. Buyers have private signals about their common value. I study whether the market becomes allocatively more efficient with (i) more buyers, (ii) better-informed buyers. Both increase the…
A platform charges a producer for disclosing quality evidence to consumers before trade. It aims to maximize its revenue guarantee across potentially multiple equilibria which arise from the interdependence of producer purchase decisions…
It is standard practice in online retail to run pricing experiments by randomizing at the article-level, i.e. by changing prices of different products to identify treatment effects. Due to customers' cross-price substitution behavior, such…
Second-hand markets have expanded rapidly with the growth of online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) platforms. A key feature of C2C markets is that sellers are typically non-professionals and often face uncertainty about the quality of the goods…
We study the behavior of for-profit institutions that broadcast reputations to foster trust among market participants. We develop a theoretical model in which buyers and sellers are matched on a platform to engage in transactions involving…
Every time the customer (individual or company) has to release personal information to its service provider (e.g., an online store or a cloud computing provider), it faces a trade-off between the benefits gained (enhanced or cheaper…
Consumers in many markets are uncertain about firms' qualities and costs, so buy based on both the price and the quality inferred from it. Optimal pricing depends on consumer heterogeneity only when firms with higher quality have higher…
In many service markets, expert providers possess an information advantage over consumers regarding the necessary services, creating opportunities for fraudulent practices. These may involve overtreatment through unnecessary services or…
We investigate investors voluntary disclosure decisions under uncertainty about their information endowment (Dye 1985). In our model, an investor may receive initial evidence about a target firm. Conditional on learning the initial…
Consumers often resort to third-party information such as word of mouth, testimonials and reviews to learn more about the quality of a new product. However, it may be difficult for consumers to assess the precision of such information. We…
Textbooks on statistics emphasize care and precision, via concepts such as reliability and validity in measurement, random sampling and treatment assignment in data collection, and causal identification and bias in estimation. But how do…
The seller of an asset has the option to buy hard information about the value of the asset from an intermediary. The seller can then disclose the acquired information before selling the asset in a competitive market. We study how the…
In this paper I empirically investigate prediction markets for binary options. Advocates of prediction markets have suggested that asset prices are consistent estimators of the "true" probability of a state of the world being realized. I…
We study procurement design when the buyer is uncertain about both the value of the good and the seller's cost. The buyer has a conjectured model but does not fully trust it. She first identifies mechanisms that maximize her worst-case…