This essay reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on quality disclosure and certification. After comparing quality disclosure with other quality assurance mechanisms and describing a brief history of quality disclosure, we address three key theoretical issues: (i) Why don't sellers...

We investigate empirically the determinants of the quality of governments in a large cross-section of countries. We assess government performance using measures of government intervention, public sector efficiency, public good provision, size of government, and political freedom. We find that...

We develop a new model of quality to capture the idea that even if a customer chooses to purchase a product, it may fail to deliver.' In this event, the customer may wish to choose some other product. We model this as a two stage game where firms first choose quality and then price. We find that...

We study the relation between product quality and worker quality using an economic model that, under certain conditions, provides a direct link between product price, product quality and work force quality. Our measures of product quality are the evolution in the detailed product price relative...

We develop a two-country model of endogenous innovation and imitation in order to study the interactions between these two processes. Firms in the North race to bring out the next generation of a set of technology-intensive products. Each product potentially can be improved a countably infinite...

We estimate a Bayesian learning model in order to assess the value of health plan performance information and the extent to which the explicit provision of information about product quality alters consumer behavior. We take advantage of a natural experiment in which health plan performance...

This paper examines the construction of a price index based on an estimated demand system. In principle the method examined can produce a price index that accounts for introduction of new products and quality changes in existing products. However, I isolate two key assumptions that have to be...

This paper develops a model of evolving standards for academic publishing. It is motivated by the increasing tendency of academic journals to require multiple revisions of articles and by changes in the content of articles. Papers are modeled as varying along two quality dimensions: q and r. The...

Our analysis melds two traditional approaches to promoting quality. The first is restoring the stock of quality. The second is curbing its flow of deterioration. Although both approaches are widely used in real world settings, analytic models have tended to focus on one strategy or the other. We...