We study price efficiency and trading behavior in laboratory limit order markets with asymmetrically informed traders. Markets differ in the number of insiders present and in the subset of traders who receive information about the number of insiders present. We observe that price efficiency (i)...

In markets for credence goods sellers are better informed than their customers about the quality that yields the highest surplus from trade. This paper studies second-degree price-discrimination in such markets. It shows that discrimination regards the amount of advice offered to customers and...

Credence goods, such as car repairs or medical services, are characterized by severe informational asymmetries between sellers and consumers, leading to fraud in the form of provision of insufficient service (undertreatment), provision of unnecessary service (overtreatment) and charging too much...

This paper challenges recent results on the fragility of the value of commitment. It introduces a specific notion of the 'value of information' for a later-moving player about the action choice of a previously-moving player, gives conditions under which this value is positive and shows that a...

In markets where transactions are governed by contractual incompleteness, revealed intentions to evade taxes may affect market performance. We experimentally examine the impact of tax evasion attempts on the performance of credence goods markets, where contractual incompleteness results from...

Empirical literature on moral hazard focuses exclusively on the direct impact of asymmetric information on market outcomes, thus ignoring possible repercussions. We present a field experiment in which we consider a phenomenon that we call second-degree moral hazard - the tendency of the supply...

Technological progress offers new and promising ways to provide targeted information to consumers and facilitate behavioral change. We conduct a randomized controlled trial with a global supermarket chain and food producer to evaluate the effectiveness of a targeted information intervention that...

In this paper, we experimentally investigate the effect of public consumer ratings on market outcomes in credence goods markets. Contrary to search or experience goods, consumers cannot evaluate all dimensions of trade for credence goods, which may inhibit the information and reputation-building...

This paper shows that a transaction tax makes trades in decentralized markets more information sensitive and enlarges the range of information costs for which the equilibrium exhibits private information acquisition and endogenous adverse selection. A transaction tax reduces the probability of...

We report the results of an experiment to systematically investigate the influence of different settings in credence good markets on opportunism in the sellers' decisions. We find that, as predicted by a cognitive dissonance model, the specific choice of the design features might be less...