Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. This option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labour market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up...

In recent years various contributions have analyzed the credence goods problem under a wide variety of assumptions yielding equilibria exhibiting various degrees of inefficiencies and fraud. The variety of results has fostered the impression that the equilibrium behaviour of experts and...

This paper studies price competition between experts and discounters in a market for credence goods. While experts can identify a consumer's problem by exerting costly but unobservable diagnosis effort, discounters just sell treatments without giving any advice. The unobservability of diagnosis...

This Paper studies the consequences of price discrimination in a market for experts’ services. In the case of experts markets, where the expert observes the intervention that a consumer needs to fix his problem and also provides a treatment, price discrimination proceeds along the dimension of...

In this article we propose a two stage procedure to model demand decisions by customers who are balancing several dimensions of a product. We then test our procedure by analyzing the behavior of buyers from an Austrian price comparison site. Although in such a market a consumer will typically...