Related papers: Credibility in Credence Goods Markets

When introducing a novel product, a seller sets a price and decides how much information to provide to a buyer, who may incur a search cost to discover an outside option. The buyer knows the outside option distribution; the seller knows…

We consider a financial market in which traders potentially face restrictions in trading some of the available securities. Traders are heterogeneous with respect to their beliefs and risk profiles, and the market is assumed thin: traders…

Consumers value keeping some information about them private from potential marketers. E-commerce dramatically increases the potential for marketers to accumulate otherwise private information about potential customers. Online marketers…

The information released to investors in financial markets has various forms. We refer to range information as information about the upper and lower bound which the payoff of a risky asset may reach in the future. This study develops…

Prediction markets mobilize financial incentives to forecast binary event outcomes through the aggregation of dispersed beliefs and heterogeneous information. Their growing popularity and demonstrated predictive accuracy in political…

I consider the monopolistic pricing of informational good. A buyer's willingness to pay for information is from inferring the unknown payoffs of actions in decision making. A monopolistic seller and the buyer each observes a private signal…

The standard framework of online bidding algorithm design assumes that the seller commits himself to faithfully implementing the rules of the adopted auction. However, the seller may attempt to cheat in execution to increase his revenue if…

This paper examines competitive information disclosure in search markets with a mix of savvy consumers, who search costlessly, and inexperienced consumers, who face positive search costs. Savvy consumers incentivize truthful disclosure;…

An expert tells an advisee whether to take an action that may be good or bad. He may provide a condition under which to take the action. This condition predicts whether the action is good if and only if the expert is competent. Providing…

Experts' beliefs embody a present state of knowledge. It is desirable to take this knowledge into account when doing analyses or making decisions. Yet ranking experts based on the merit of their beliefs is a difficult task. In this paper we…

This paper studies optimal mechanisms for collecting and trading data. Consumers benefit from revealing information about their tastes to a service provider because this improves the service. However, the information is also valuable to a…

We examine the implications of consumer privacy when preferences today depend upon past consumption choices, and consumers shop from different sellers in each period. Although consumers are ex ante identical, their initial consumption…

A sender flexibly acquires evidence--which she may pay a third party to certify--to disclose to a receiver. When evidence acquisition is overt, the receiver observes the evidence gathering process irrespective of whether its outcome is…

A principal hires an agent to acquire soft information about an unknown state. Even though neither how the agent learns nor what the agent discovers are contractible, we show the principal is unconstrained as to what information the agent…

We examine an economy in which interactions are more productive if agents can trust others to refrain from cheating. Some agents are scoundrels, who cheat at every opportunity, while others cheat only if the cost of cheating, a decreasing…

Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health, to sports, business, and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence-believing…

We suggest that one individual holds multiple degrees of belief about an outcome, given the evidence. We then investigate the implications of such noisy probabilities for a buyer and a seller of binary options and find the odds agreed upon…

Bilateral trade is one of the most natural and important forms of economic interaction: A seller has a single, indivisible item for sale, and a buyer is potentially interested. The two parties typically have different, privately known…

Market share and quality, or customer satisfaction, go together. Yet inferring one from the other appears difficult. Indeed, such an inference would need detailed information about customer behavior, and might be clouded by modes of…

In economics, there are many ways to describe the interaction between a "seller" and a "buyer". The most common one, with which we interact almost every day, is selling for a fixed price. This option is perfect for selling a mass product,…