Certifiers have a crucial role in facilitating effective communication in the online and the traditional world. As a way of generating statistically meaningful information, certification has been adopted in financial statements evaluation and more recently in various online communities as well....

Organizations face a competitive certification market for their statements, the statements do not convince third parties unless certified, the organizations are sometimes better served by a lie, and honest mistakes are possible. In our model of such a market: if certifiers are liable for...

Abstract A scoring rule is proper if it elicits an expert's true beliefs as a probabilistic forecast, and it is strictly proper if it uniquely elicits an expert's true beliefs. The value function associated with a (strictly) proper scoring rule is (strictly) convex on any convex set of beliefs....

Consumers' average value for information goods, websites, weather forecasts, music, and news declines with the number consumed. This paper provides simple guidelines to optimal bundling marketing strategies in this case. If consumers' values do not decrease too quickly, we show that bundling is...